


pray for the thunder and the rain (to quietly pass me by)

by spider_fingers



Series: knife!corvo and the string of consequences [1]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Knife!Beatrici, Knife!Corvo, M/M, Miscommunication, Protector!Daud, sometimes it's both at once, there are two kinds of sex in this fic: fun romp and inadvisable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:27:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 52,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25023151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spider_fingers/pseuds/spider_fingers
Summary: Corvo smiled, and his nose was wrinkling again. “Got sidetracked. I meant to show you something.”“Hmm.” Daud looked him over, idly curious. “What kind of thing?”“Just this,” Corvo said, reaching behind his neck to the hood of his coat, and pulled a mask up and over his head.The top half was a metal visor, jagged edges welded on, goggles making it look like something out of the deeps; but the tears in the cloth under it, stitched in gold, were a mouth wired shut.[chapter 1: in which the current state of affairs becomes apparentchapter 2: in which Corvo looks at his problems and decides he needs different oneschapter 3: in which Corvo tries to ignore reality, and reality comes back and kicks him in the nutschapter 4: in which all is (mostly) resolved]
Relationships: Corvo Attano & Beatrici Attano, Corvo Attano/Daud, Corvo Attano/Delilah Copperspoon, Daud/Jessamine Kaldwin (minor), Jessamine Kaldwin/Beatrici Attano (minor), definite polyamory vibes
Series: knife!corvo and the string of consequences [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1846795
Comments: 45
Kudos: 44





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> did i title this fic with some guns n roses lyrics purely for a throwaway line in the first scene? absolutely  
>   
> the fic itself is based on a badthingshappenbingo prompt from an anonymous user (dragged by the ankle, with corvodaud or corvodelilah) but i decided to grab both ships and run and also dropped the actual prompt along the way so it ends up being a minor part of their backstory only revealed in the last chapter, very sorry about that, entirely not sorry about anything else

“You know him?” Rulfio asked, jerking his chin at the bartop behind Daud's shoulder. Daud shot a glance over, eyes narrowed. Shook his head.

“No.” He sipped at the finger of rum in his glass and tried to ignore how the stranger's eyes were burning into his back.

The man sat alone at the counter, but he wasn't hunched over or tense—not trying to hide and not anticipating either, whether a fight or something else—just... staring, intent. Daud couldn't read his expression.

“He looks like he wants to get to know _you,_ ” Galia said. She smirked and knocked back her stout. “If you know what I mean.”

Daud sniped a glare in her direction but he knew it was too late: Rinaldo was leaning forward, something impish and daring in his smile, his own drink almost forgotten, and Galia sat back with a glint in her eye like she knew exactly what she was doing—though it was anyone's guess whether Daud or Rinaldo was supposed to be the victim here.

“I'll buy your next round if you ask him for a smoke,” Rinaldo said, breaking the smile into a grin. He'd been the squad baby for a year; now he was doing his best to be the squad bastard instead. Daud had a reputation for being cold and untouchable, the kind of aloof that in other men might betray a deep discomfort with conversation.

Not that refusing what was tantamount to a childish dare could damage it, of course—but he still leaned across the table and said, “Weak challenge,” then pushed back his chair, satisfaction warming his chest at the look on Rinaldo's face. Surprise and outrage went so well together.

The man at the counter watched him approach with keen interest. His glass was only half-finished—something dark and frothy—and perspiration had condensed and run down the glass to pool around the bottom. Daud met him eye for eye and stopped, leaning an elbow on the bar.

“You're bold,” Daud said, and the man tilted his head a little, like he was looking for a new angle to observe him from. “New to Dunwall?”

“I wouldn't say that,” he answered. His fingers fidgeted on the glass. “I haven't been inside this place before, though.”

Daud was used to reading situations for certain cues—being Royal Protector was a ride or die kind of job, he'd come to know—but he wondered whether this man was aware how many red flags his phrasing was bringing up. Not inside this place before: had he seen it before, then? Had he been _watching_ it?

This pub had good enough whiskey Daud had come back a few times. Had the man been watching _him?_

He kept his face impassive, and the other man looked back at him, direct, as though he had nothing to hide. There were no weapons clearly visible in or on his hooded coat. (This meant little, Daud knew.) His hair was long, only haphazardly held back by a night-blue ribbon, and his eyes—they were off, somehow. Subtly wrong. Like the pub's dim lights didn't quite reach them.

Strange eyes weren't enough to arrest or even punch him for, though, and neither was triggering Daud's sometimes rampant paranoia.

“You're looking at me like you want something.” Daud gave him a deliberate once-over, taking in the dark skin, the hawkish nose—Serkonan, or of recent descent. “Care to tell me what? Or haven't you decided yet?”

The man smiled. It crinkled the edges of his eyes, and something seemed to move in them. “Only some company.” His accent had been Gristol at first, but now it edged on Morlish, hard to place. Proper mystery.

“I'll consider it if you offer me a cigarette,” Daud said.

“... I'm fine with that,” the man answered, and pulled a narrow roll of paper from his coat; drew out a thin sheet; took a tobacco pouch from his back pocket. His hands worked on automatic, filling the paper with loose shreds, tucking and rolling it with a practiced move of his fingers. His level stare never left Daud's face—not even as he slid his tongue along the paper's outer edge, deliberately slow, and pressed it smooth.

He held out the cigarette—then flicked it away when Daud reached for it, the tilt of his head mischievous. Daud shot him an unimpressed look, eyebrows high, and he handed it over with a quirk of a smile on his mouth, not at all shamed.

He hopped off his seat, and Daud signalled the squad. Rulfio, always alert, nodded.

“Are they joining us?” the man asked, voice unbothered, but his eyes must be sharp if he'd caught the sign.

“No. They'll wait until I get back.” Daud shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat. “What's your name, then?” he added, shouldering through the door into the cold evening air. It wasn't raining for once, but the pervading damp still snuck into his clothes, and he pulled at his collar to better protect the back of his neck.

“Ah... Corvo,” the man said simply.

Daud put his back to the bricks, tucked up in the corner between the stairs to the pub and the wall, cigarette hanging from his lips. Matchbook in hand, Corvo struck one and leaned in to light the end. Out here, at the dim edge of the streetlights, his dark eyes seemed almost brighter, like a reflection off ink; curious, or appraising?

Daud grunted and puffed on the end, blowing out a thin trail of smoke. Corvo leaned back against the stairs.

“I'm guessing you've heard of me,” Daud said, words coming out thick and gray. It was good stuff, the taste strong in his nose, smooth on the tongue. His throat ached a little from the smoke. It had been a while since he'd made smoking a habit.

Corvo made a low sound. Daud's skin was starting to prickle at the scrutiny. “Some,” Corvo said. “People say you're Serkonan.” No inflection, though his eyebrows ticked up like he meant it as a question.

“Half,” Daud answered in the Karnacan brogue, and left it at that, but the bridge of Corvo's nose wrinkled with a smile like Daud had given away a secret.

“You don't have your sword,” Corvo said in the same brogue, natural as breathing, and Daud stopped inhaling the smoke for a second to consider him. It sounded a little warped, like he was out of practice, but confident. Daud pinched the cigarette from his mouth and resettled against the wall, stance open.

“I'm off duty.” He tapped away the ash. Corvo's gaze had flickered down and up, though not quite far enough to meet his eyes. Curious, Daud pursed his mouth around the end of the cigarette and sucked, the burning tip flaring. Corvo shifted on his feet, tongue wetting his lips; only looked up from his mouth when Daud felt the smirk curling on his own face.

“Hmm.” Corvo crossed his arms, deliberating. “Then should I call you Lord Protector?” His eyes shone. The taste of smoke, the burn of it—Daud could barely feel the cold anymore. “Or Daud?”

“Daud will do,” he said, and put out the half-cigarette left on the bricks to slip it into his breast pocket.

“Are you sure?” Corvo asked, head tilting in that curious way as he pushed away from the stairs. “I wouldn't mind calling you Lord Protector.” He said it low, drawn-out. Something in the tone made the blood thump in Daud's chest. “It might be fun.”

Daud huffed. “Do you always ask this many questions?”

Corvo stopped still, staring, fixed and unmoving. For a second, his smile seemed strangely shallow. Daud's hands itched for his weapons.

“Not often,” Corvo answered, forced casual, then let his smile deepen again, edging closer. “I like your voice.” Quiet, almost shy and, despite the sincerity, vaguely artificial. Daud made a note; let him step into his space; remained all too aware of every blade and garotte wire he had hidden, heart still going strong, though this time for adrenaline more than a creeping interest.

It had been harder to tell in the pub, but out here in the night-cold, Corvo radiated warmth from inside his open coat. His height made him imposing, almost threatening—the way he closed in, though, was so blatantly eager, thin hands light on Daud's shoulders, and knees bumping like he barely knew what to do with himself, it confused every alarm long enough to crowd Daud against the wall. His breath was warm, smelled a little of hops, and his eyes were set, black, biting. Something distinctly hard was poking Daud in the hip.

Daud glanced down, then back up. “You might have heard this one before,” he said, dry.

“I _am_ happy to see you,” Corvo answered, nose wrinkling with that smile again. “I do have a knife in my back pocket though.”

Daud faltered, and before he could quite think it through he groped for the back of Corvo's pants and Corvo, breath hitching, pressed his hips into Daud's, and there was definitely a knife in his back pocket, and Daud was also _definitely_ hard in his pants, fuck, okay, he could work with this.

Corvo curved in, face close; the tips of his fingers touched Daud's jaw like a request.

“Can I—” he started, and Daud grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him in.

The kiss started rough, turned deep as they pried each other open, and if Corvo was awkward as a whole then in _this_ he knew exactly what he was doing, mouth hot and wanting, hands curled around Daud's face dropping to his waist, to his ass, and almost bodily hauling him up the wall.

Daud made a rough, muffled sound into Corvo's mouth and forced him back, dropping to his heels again.

“Slow down,” he growled, one hand fisted in Corvo's lapel to push him off. The interest in Corvo's dark eyes had morphed into a hungry intent. His tongue flicked out, pink on red. Daud felt the brush of fingers on his mouth before he saw Corvo's hand, thin and warm, pressing, until the pads touched the damp inside of his lip. Someone's breath caught—then a sound, shocked and yearning. Daud looked up at Corvo who was staring back, drinking in whatever Daud must look like to have made that sound because it _had_ been him and he wanted this, powerfully, more than he could remember having wanted in a long time.

It was late, black sky and bare stars, and in this narrow street all the lights in the windows had gone out, but even for an impulse tryst with some stranger he wasn't going to do this out in the open where anyone could see. Daud scanned the length of the street and motioned to the nearest dark alley.

“Not even taking me home?” Corvo murmured, following on his heels like a darker shadow. “Cold.”

Daud half-turned and tugged on his open coat, turning into the alley with a twist. “A minute ago you would have gladly rubbed off on my leg,” he retorted, and pushed Corvo back with his hold on the coat until it was _his_ shoulders to the brickwork this time. He was obviously hard, even here, where there was barely any light. Daud cupped and squeezed a hand around him and watched Corvo's face twist and fall open, breaths short as he grappled for Daud's shoulder in support. “I have other ideas, though,” Daud finished. “You going to be still for me?” He ground his palm down on the hard bulge in Corvo's pants and the hands at his shoulders clenched and dug in as Corvo pushed into it.

“ _Fuck,_ ” he cried, raw, and subsided.

Daud laughed, rough. “I'll settle for quiet. If you can.”

Corvo laughed too, sharp and high, “Oh, yeah, of course—” and when Daud slipped the hand he'd spat in past Corvo's waistband he whined, unrestrained, hips bucking into the slick pressure.

Daud made quick work of the belt in his way, doing what he could to keep Corvo squirming until the pants were shoved down and out of the way and Daud knelt, the cobbles cold against his shins, thumbs digging harsh into Corvo's thighs until he shuffled them farther apart. He was shivering, a tremor under Daud's palms, and when he wrapped a hand around the base of him Corvo reached down and ran his fingers through Daud's hair as though testing for a reaction.

“Don't yank on it,” Daud said, twisting his hand up slow, and Corvo hissed at the friction and let out a little warble of a moan when Daud fisted the head but his hands only slipped lower to brush Daud's ear. Daud gave him a narrow smile and pumped him again, palm just barely slick with precome; made him stretch and strain into it. “Good,” he said, and bent down to mouth the soft, loose skin at the base of his cock.

“Nn—yeah—that's—” Corvo gasped, hips rolling, piecemeal and incoherent as Daud tongued up his length, and louder, _“AH—”_ a shock of sound when a knuckle dug in the tender spot behind his balls. Daud thumbed the underside of his cockhead, pulled back the foreskin to lick the pink, glistening tip, slick salty and bitter on his tongue; growled, irritated, when Corvo bucked again, slipping out of his grasp. It was getting to be a distraction more than anything else. He grabbed the sharp angle of Corvo's hip, fingers digging into the meat of his ass, and pinned him to the wall with a final shove.

“ _FUCK_ yes,” Corvo yelled, ass clenching under Daud's hand and fingers clawing hard.

Daud grunted and shook him off, shuffling up on his knees, fisted the base of his cock again and sucked, harsh, at the tip—headed off the surge of movement and kept him still. Good. Corvo groaned above him, and there was a thump like a fist hitting brick. Daud slid his mouth down a little further, his own sounds muffled, tongue working at the beading slit, heavy with musk—and his throat still prickled a little from the smoke, the illusion of having been wrecked without the discomfort of choking for it, so he hummed, flexed his tongue and sucked again, and Corvo's soft words pitched high and keening—

“—oh, oh _shit,_ ah! Yes! Please there yes that's so good that's yes _yes AH, Outsider's eyes—_ ”

—and Daud pulled off slow, mouthing at the tip before letting it pop from his lips and his thoughts had gone pleasingly hazy, just enough that he only now noticed Corvo's fingers cradling his jaw, brushing down to his throat as he swallowed. Daud's grip wasn't quite enough to quiet Corvo's desperate writhing, trying to fuck the funnel of his hand and only managing to wind himself up further, so he squeezed a little tighter, enjoying Corvo's breathless cursing, jerked him firm and steady and tasted the slick running down his shaft, greedy, deeply satisfied, before taking him in his mouth again, jaw wide, until his lips met the skin of his hand. His mouth was full and hot with it. He sucked in a breath through his nose, tried not to drool, and Corvo came without warning as he was pulling back up.

It took him a second to reorient—then Daud grimaced, and spat come on the cobbles as he stood. Corvo had slumped back against the wall, but as soon as Daud came up he righted himself, pulling his pants back on, and reached to brush his thumb at the wet corner of Daud's mouth. Daud's knees were damp and aching, but his jaw was barely sore, and Corvo was licking spit and come off his own thumb, looking Daud square in the eye.

“How do you want me?” he asked, hoarse, and his voice and persistent stare reminded Daud how hard he was. Still, he smirked; took up Corvo's belt and smugly closed it around Corvo's waist.

“I've already had you,” he rasped.

Corvo frowned, grabbing his lapels like that might keep him there. “You didn't—” A hesitation. “Did you?”

“No,” Daud admitted, which in itself was enough to make him flush, heartbeat heavy in his throat; Corvo reeled him in to feel the proof against his hip, feel the hitching breath and the tension. “Just—your hands,” Daud gritted out, and let himself lean into Corvo's warmth, still boiling up from inside his coat; let himself sink in, gripping Corvo's waist to steady himself, when hands slid under his jacket, pulled his shirt from his pants and slipped in, under, immediate and right.

It was barely a handjob: him rocking up into the pressure of a leg or of a curling hand, and Corvo exploring, his fingertips a little cold before they warmed in the depths of Daud's clothes. Mostly, he basked, lazy with heat while he could, knowing that when they were done he would be back in the damp and drizzle of good old Dunwall—and Corvo was letting him, his breath stirring Daud's hair, apparently fine with how he burrowed in. He smelled of sweat under the coat, a little, and below that of metal and roses. It was nice enough. Daud shivered, languid, and came in the cup of Corvo's palm.

As he straightened himself out, he saw Corvo looking at the spend in his hand.

“Don't,” he barked, and Corvo shot him a narrow-eyed look and wiped it off on the bricks. Then, they watched each other from across the cobbles, not quite awkward, transaction done with and uncertain where to go. Daud shoved his hands back in his pockets. “Has fucking around with the Royal Protector sated your curiosity then?” he asked, wry.

Corvo smiled, and his nose was wrinkling again. Daud hated that he found it sweet.

“Ah, some, I guess,” he said. “Got sidetracked. I meant to show you something.”

“Hmm.” Daud looked him over, idly curious. “What kind of thing?”

“Just this,” Corvo said, reaching behind his neck to the hood of his coat, and pulled a mask up and over his head.

The top half was a metal visor, jagged edges welded on, goggles making it look like something out of the deeps; but the tears in the cloth under it, stitched in gold, were a mouth wired shut.

Adrenaline slammed cold through him. His first, dangerously stupid instinct was to reach for the sword that wasn't there, but Corvo—the Void-damned _Ghost of Dunwall_ —didn't move: hesitating? waiting? No matter. Daud tightened his grip on the knife he'd whipped out of his coat instead and glanced down the alleyway—the few times he'd been seen the Ghost had worked alone but that didn't preclude to possibility of ambush—and when he looked back the Ghost was gone.

No—not gone, just silent, perched up on an awning further down, out of reach but still watching. There was no clear way for him to have gotten up there unless he could somehow climb walls without making a sound.

“What game are you playing?” Daud snapped, and a wave of loathing surged through him at the realization that he _recognized_ the way the man's head tilted now, that he _knew_ who was under the mask—but he kept his knife hand steady and an ear out for anything new from the mouth of the alley. Maybe if he stalled long enough, the others would come outside to find him.

“Would you believe I was nostalgic?” Corvo— the Ghost said, his voice only slightly muffled by the cloth. Daud gritted his teeth, snarling, but that didn't seem to faze him. “Not many Serks in Dunwall. People here think I'm _exotic._ ” He leaned forward, precariously crouched on the balls of his feet. “Is that why the Empress picked you out?”

“The Empress chose me because I know my way around a sword,” Daud shot back, and Corvo laughed, bright, the curve of his neck visible beneath the mask.

“That you do,” he said, more delighted than cutting, as though he thought they might be anything but enemies.

Daud bared his teeth and growled. _“Stop.”_

It was almost surprising when Corvo— the Ghost paused, and scratched at the back of his neck, looking sheepish this time. He shrugged, face turning away.

“I was curious what you'd do.” His voice was softer now. “You're more fun than you look.”

“Were you hoping I'd take you to the Tower?” Daud spat, even harsher, refusing him the quiet. “Is this a warning? What?” His hand hurt with how hard he was holding on to his blade; he loosened his grip, just a little, just enough his knuckles didn't feel like they would split open from the strain.

The Ghost shook his head. “I won't touch your Empress.” Then, considering: “Tell her she's doing good work with the Abbey.”

Daud's eyes narrowed. “So that's why you approached me.” There had been rumors, of course, as there often were around notorious killers. “You're a heretic.”

Infuriatingly, the Ghost laughed. “No, I mean— That's not why,” he said, clearly not denying it, and was it worse that Daud's stance had slipped, relaxing until his blade was level with his hip, or that he was curious now, seeing the mask and knowing only a part of what lay behind it?

“So what now?” he said, and the sound of the pub's doors opening out in the street broke through the silence around them.

“Boss?” That was Galia—and in the second Daud took to glance in that direction the Ghost somehow reached the building's low roof. He crouched at the edge for a moment, looking down, and raised his hand in goodbye.

“Gotta go,” he said, then vanished just as the squad rounded the corner.

“Daud?” Rulfio. Daud stared at the empty line of the roof, ink-blue sky behind, and his hand clenched on the hilt of his blade again. He turned on his heel. They were looking at him, Galia's expression trying to be amused and failing at the sight of him.

“We're going,” he ordered, and when Rinaldo made to open his mouth he snapped, “No questions,” and took the lead to head back through the night, cold down to his flesh and bones.

*

Dunwall, on the whole, thought of itself as different—but aside from how it rained more here than anywhere else Corvo had lived, it was much the same as the rest: you were poor and you fucked up and someone would break you for it, or you were rich and you got away.

The rooftops were better than the wide spread of towns back in Caulkenny, though: higher, harder to get to but with nicer vantage points. Not as many balconies as there had been in Karnaca. He missed that a little—practically a stepladder, the way the place was built.

His legs dangled over the edge of the chimney spout, swinging. The clouds had retreated for once, and he'd turned his face into the sun, finding a simple satisfaction in the change of weather. Down below, a carriage drawn by two horses rattled across the cobblestones, followed by another, heavier-looking one. People sometimes stopped to look, and the guards sitting atop the second carriage would stare pointedly ahead, and the people would hurry on, curious and wary, the pattern of it charming to observe.

Nothing had come of his meeting with the Royal Protector on his day off—or at least, nothing he could see, no criers' announcements, no new posters to show the bounty on the Ghost had gone up. Had the man believed him, then, when he'd said he wouldn't touch the Empress? It had been the truth, but people rarely believed him anymore once they saw the mask—or maybe it was just that the encounter hardly counted for anything compared to what he and Beatrici had already done.

Of course, the lack of proof of his misdeeds had done nothing to stop his sister from giving him one glance when he got home and narrowing her eyes in suspicion. _You did something,_ she'd said. He'd laughed and said she wouldn't like it if he told her the details, and she had looked at the mask pushed back behind his head and asked if he had shown his face, and he had said, _Bea, please. I know not to leave traces._ She had turned back to the commission letters spread out across the table and said, _You take too many risks. Mistakes happen._ So he had made her tea and watched her deal with the paperwork until he'd nodded off, and later he had woken alone, with a blanket over him, and all he had wanted was to go to sleep again.

Corvo slid off the chimney to land light on the tiles, and made his way a few buildings over, eyes tracking the street below. The carriages had turned a corner and stopped at the curb alongside Morgengaard Park, and a retinue of guards were leaving the second carriage, getting into formation around the door of the first. Hmm. He didn't much feel like waiting for however long it would take them to walk from one end of the park to the other. A thrill pushed his heart to beat faster, his fingertips tingling with it. Time to step in.

Perched at the limit between tile and rain gutter, he drew his knife from its sheath and angled it towards the sun, then watched, attentive, as the first carriage opened and the Royal Protector, then the Empress, stepped out. Corvo twisted his wrist and made the blade flash in the light.

To the man's credit, his reaction was immediate: his eyes snapped up and he grabbed the Empress by the arm and the back of her neck, shoving her back in the carriage with little care for propriety. Corvo waved, smiling even as he knew Daud couldn't see it.

There might have been a moment's hesitation—recognition, or a decision made, Corvo couldn't be sure—but then the Royal Protector was barking orders, motioning towards the skyline, and two of the guards with muskets turned and trained their weapons on him.

Corvo ducked back just as the shots rang out, one pinging against the tiles with distressingly good aim. The chase was on—he'd have to be careful to keep mostly out of sight.

Corvo had personally witnessed only one attempt on the Empress's life in the years he'd been here, but even that had been enough to tell him there was a procedure to these things, and that procedure was to take the shortest, fastest route to the safety of the Tower. The carriages would stop for nothing. He only had to be a little faster, and keep the guards' eyes high, and he could probably do this without too much trouble.

He was quick, and a few leaps and some rapid-fire route planning later he had come level with the procession below; showing himself for a second attracted more musket fire—watching the rooftops, good—and he passed back out of sight, starting to make his way down. The carriages were mostly following main thoroughfares, too wide to take any side streets, but there was a passage up ahead just large enough to let them through, and a shortcut to the Tower besides—

Corvo reached street level on the other side of the passage just as they turned into it, and took that moment of respite to catch his breath, shoulder against the wall. Void cold thrummed under his skin; people's eyes slid off him as they passed. The horses clipped by with a nervous jerk of their heads, and as the first carriage rolled past him he grabbed the door and jumped onto the step.

It wasn't locked—a lucky oversight—so he only had to twist the handle and step inside, bending a little to get his head through. The Empress's stunned face was only just visible over her Protector's shoulder, who had leapt up as soon as the door opened, one arm out like a shield, and was going for his sword, struggling to focus on the space Corvo occupied.

“Sorry, your Highness,” he said, smiling bright, “I need to borrow your Lord Protector.”

Then Daud, who hadn't gone for his sword after all, pulled a gun from his belt and started to aim and Corvo, surprise pulling on instinct, clenched his fist and shot first.

Daud's hand erupted in a starburst of pain and the gun clattered to the floor. He lunged for the sword instead but too Void-damned late, someone's grip on the front of his coat pulling him off-balance, vision blurred and off-putting and then air and sound and finally the cobblestones hit him as he—they, there was an attacker despite what his eyes were trying to tell him—fell from the carriage onto the street. Daud inhaled past the ache of his ribs to yell an order and got a mouthful of leather jacket, and another arm curled tight around his neck, choking. He threw an elbow into the mass at his back, and again, but he could barely breathe, blood cut off by pressure, and his vision was tunnelling and all he could see was Jessamine hanging out the carriage door, shouting something, looking past him, getting further away as the carriage barrelled on—

His ears were ringing. He struggled, kicking his heels where they were dragging along the cobbles, until a liberating rush of air and a tight pinpoint of pain in his stomach made him realize that one, he'd been let go, and two, there was a blade pressed to his flank, digging through the coat and into skin.

“If you yell— I _will_ stab you,” said a voice that sounded familiar, rough and wheezing. “I know—hh, gut wounds are nasty, but, I need you to be quiet.”

He'd been backed into a doorway, in the passage the carriages had gone through, not quite out of sight. A woman leading a child by the hand passed not three feet from them and seemed to pay them no mind. He turned to watch her go—the prick of the dagger pressing in reminded him where he was, and who was there with him.

The Ghost. He assumed it was the Ghost. His face was imprecise, somehow, and though it didn't blur his vision like it had in the carriage Daud still found himself squinting, like he was looking into the sun.

“It'll be— easier, if you close your eyes,” the Ghost said, and Daud bared his teeth and refused, fighting the ache building up in the front of his head. The Ghost looked drained, almost gray, too much for what little Daud had hit him with, like—

“Are you sick?” Daud asked, mind whirling. He thought of the people Jessamine had only recently gotten reports of in the northern districts, sick with something strange and new. She'd ordered them to stay home while doctors set up emergency offices—had the confinement failed? The things he'd heard it did to people—

The taste of copper sprang up in his mouth and Daud licked at his lip, belatedly realizing his nose was bleeding. A hand, long and cold, folded over his face.

“I told you to close your eyes,” he said. “And no, I'm not sick, it's— never mind, it'll pass in a few.”

Which meant Daud would have even less of a chance of escaping. He clenched his fists at the thought and winced, grunting, when that jostled the crossbow bolt sticking through his palm.

“Sorry about the hand.” It might have sounded apologetic if Daud wasn't currently boxed into a dark doorway and being threatened with a knife. “I panicked. You don't usually carry a gun.”

 _I'll send you a memo next time,_ Daud thought, bitter, but let nothing show. Footsteps passed by again: no pause, no unsubtle speeding up at the sight of a mugging in progress.

“How are you doing that,” Daud hissed before he could stop himself, and heard the shuffle of the Ghost's feet as he resettled. He was almost glad for the hand over his eyes, if it meant he didn't have to see whether the bastard's head had tilted, that loose angle he had a jarringly accurate memory of.

“... I answer your questions, you answer mine?” the Ghost offered, tentatively hopeful.

So this was an interrogation. Not a particularly good one; they might be out of plain sight but it was still the middle of the day, and beyond the knife at his gut Daud had barely been threatened. Or maybe that was the plan. Let him relax, let him trust. Stupid fucking plan, in his opinion.

“Depends on the questions,” he rasped, licking away the residue of blood coating his teeth. His hands were free. If he was careful about it, he could maybe reach one of his own knives. Sticking the guy a couple of times was worth the risk of getting stabbed himself.

“How am I doing what?” the Ghost asked, ignoring Daud's remark. The dagger in his side kept steady.

“Making yourself invisible.” He straightened a little against the door to mask the drifting of his hand towards his belt. The point of the dagger followed him but went no deeper.

“I'm— persuading them not to see us.” His palm was growing clammy against Daud's face. “With magic.”

“Is that what you did to me back then?” Daud asked him, deceptively mild, and the dagger shifted like the Ghost had startled. Daud took the chance to shift closer to his belt again. “Persuaded me? I tested the cigarette you rolled and it wasn't drugs, so was it a spell?” He could feel his own jaw strain with tension, the things he'd been asking himself over and over since the pub bubbling up like scum in the heat. “Why can't I remember your fucking _face,_ Corvo?” he spat, and the hand over his eyes jumped like the words were a punch.

“It's my turn to ask questions,” Corvo answered, flat, and Daud gritted his teeth until his ears popped, but he kept quiet, waiting. There was the distinct sound of someone swallowing. “Does— Did the Empress have any sisters?”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause as Daud tried not to let his own growing fury distract him from the task at hand, notably getting that hand on a weapon, and he damn well _hoped_ it was enough time for Corvo to understand how badly things would go if ever they crossed paths again.

“... This is what you attacked me in a moving carriage for,” he rasped, hoarse with rage. “You _ruined_ my day to ask me _stupid questions_ that anyone who's read Lingard's _Account of the Kaldwin Line_ could answer—”

“You've lived in the Tower for more than a decade,” Corvo cut in before he could properly pick up steam, “And official histories don't mention bastards. Keep your voice down.” The dagger pressed in pointedly. He might be bleeding. His shirt felt damp against his waist. Daud breathed in, slow, and back out, and carefully moved his hand again.

“You stopped going out for drinks,” Corvo added, like that was any kind of explanation. Daud burned at the thought he'd been watched for so long.

“You could have written a letter.” He made the words snide, like he didn't believe Corvo could write at all.

“Would you have read it?”

Of course he would have read it. Then he would have handed it over to the Spymaster, who had people who could trace it back to the source, and he would have forgotten about it, and he wouldn't have cared. Corvo knew this. He smirked, so Corvo would also know no part of him felt guilty for it, and the asshole had the gall to huff.

“Just answer the question.”

“I didn't make note of any indiscretions on the Emperor's part while I knew him,” Daud sneered, lip curling back. “If he had any bastards he took that secret to the grave.”

“Fair enough,” Corvo said, then, like he couldn't get the words out fast enough, “I can mask memories of me, of my face—that's why you can't remember what I look like.”

Even now, knowing he'd recognized Corvo on the roof, the image was difficult to put together. Did he have dark hair? Red? He was Serkonan, Daud was distantly certain, but was he ready to set the Royal Guard on every Serkonan man in the city? He tried to push, dig deeper, past the high-pitched ringing in his ears, and his lips were wet and copper-tasting again, his head too light, hollowed out.

“Stop that.” The hand pressed in deeper against his eyes. It was warming up now, though still damp. “Whatever I answer your other question with you won't like it, so: I didn't have to persuade you. I barely had to convince you outside.”

“I don't trust you,” Daud said, sharp, but that wasn't _I don't believe you_ and they both knew it, Daud most of all. He gritted his teeth, and put the teeming of his thoughts away for later. “That wasn't the question I wanted to ask.”

“Wait your turn,” Corvo said simply.

Daud shifted again, and his fingers touched the sheath of a carving knife. Good. Almost there.

“Sergei Arsenyev.” Daud froze, the tips of his fingers cold on the leather. “I've seen him go into the Tower. What's he done?”

“Secretary work,” he answered, the lie falling off his tongue easy. Arsenyev—one of Burrows' spies. “What do you want with him?” Did the Ghost know who the man worked for? If he did, what else had he gotten access to? Was there a leak coming from inside the Tower? That kind of information running on the streets was the sort of dangerous Daud barely even wanted to contemplate.

“No, what did he _do._ Did he kill someone? Talk to the wrong person?”

The realization hit him like a brick. “You have a contract on him.” Corvo's silence was as good as a confession. “Who ordered it?”

The hand across his face was steady, and so was the dagger poking into his side, but still he thought Corvo's voice shook when he said, “I can't tell you.”

“Who ordered it, Corvo.”

“I can't tell you—”

The hilt of his knife was in his hand and he slashed upwards, vicious; Corvo fell back with a bitten-off cry of pain, wavered and vanished then reappeared some distance away, holding his cheek where blood was starting to pearl. His outline was clear again, sharper than ever, almost more real than the rest of the world—people were stopping, staring, shocked. Corvo looked up at him.

It was obvious now, out in the daylight, how his eyes were too black; and they stared right through Daud, right into his meager little soul, before the Ghost vanished out of sight and clear memory again.

“Outsider take your fucking heart,” Daud muttered, touching the tear in his coat to find it wet and dark, and pressed a palm against it before pushing off the wall. He was tired even thinking of the walk back—it was some distance to the Tower, and he couldn't be sure of his reception once he got there, what with disappearing inexplicably in the middle of a getaway. He tried not to think of how Corvo had jerked back his dagger almost before Daud's blade struck him, or how little he regretted letting the Ghost escape.

*

As he trudged up the narrow staircase to the flat he shared with Beatrici, Corvo could still feel his heartbeat jackrabbiting in his throat. His cheek ached where Daud's knife had cut him, the open line of it hot and crusted with blood he had tried to wipe away; his ribs were still sore—the Royal Protector didn't kid around when throwing elbows—and there was a smile on his face. Considering how the lady on the first floor had looked at him, it was a stupid one. He could feel it there, stretching the cut on his cheek in strange ways.

His mind kept flitting back to the chase and the moment where it had all come to a head: action-reaction, hauling on his thread of connection to the Void to keep himself cloaked, the slightest weakening certain to be a death sentence. _Pretty exciting,_ he thought, still hazy with overexertion. It would take him the rest of the day to pull out of it, he knew, and the post-adrenaline jitters wouldn't make it any easier, but nothing could take away from that moment, that walking-on-a-clothesline moment, where everything had been in the balance and he had succeeded.

Well. Maybe one thing: that look on the Royal Protector's face, when Corvo had blurred his memories again with a glance. Could be he'd burned that bridge, this time, and for nothing very concrete beyond knowing that Arsenyev certainly wasn't a secretary, and was more important than he looked—but the latter had already been obvious, considering Spymaster Burrows was the one asking for the man to die.

Corvo hadn't recognized Arsenyev's name when Beatrici handed him the info he needed to check—an address in the financial district—but he had a good memory for faces, and when Corvo caught sight of him leaving his home he knew he had seen the man before, seen him enter and leave the Tower on more than one occasion while he observed the cycle of its movements. (Observed the Empress. And then, the Royal Protector.)

Why was Lord Burrows targeting people where he worked? From what Corvo had seen of the contract, he wanted it to look like an accident. Did Arsenyev know something? Had he done something? Corvo wasn't sure. It was usually one or the other, when you wanted someone made permanently quiet.

Corvo had watched him close for a week every chance he could—the contract would pay well, since it asked for a killing, but the deadline was some time away, and Beatrici had more urgent business to deal with—and the more he watched the more questions he had bubbling up in him, unstoppable. Arsenyev spent most days hanging around public places, never talking to the same person twice, sometimes exchanging letters and packages wrapped in nondescript paper (a messenger?); the rest of the time he spent at home. There, Corvo couldn't see him except as an occasional passing shape through the windows, like he made a point of avoiding them. When he got closer, a thin high-pitched whining brushed against him—a bonecharm, somewhere in the house.

It was weird, and a little frustrating, and in the end Corvo had wheedled Beatrici into following him across the rooftops, a flittering shadow catching up to him in the blink of an eye.

He had pointed down to the figure idling by a fountain in the plaza, and Beatrici had focused, hawk-eyed.

“Who is it?” she'd asked, voice pitched low. They had been high enough nobody could listen, but it was force of habit.

“Sergei Arsenyev,” he'd answered, not looking at her, knowing anyway that she'd turned to him with eyes narrow and accusing, her mouth all disappointed in that way he hated.

“You told me he wasn't home.” He'd shrugged, waved down like that would get her to focus again. “Corvo.” She didn't even have to stress his name to make it sound like a scolding. To be fair, most of what she said to him these days sounded like that: disappointed, cold, like he was a little brother again more than a partner in crime. He had no idea how to change things back. Sometimes, he wasn't even sure it hadn't always been this way, and he just hadn't noticed.

“There's something I can't see,” he had said, tense, still looking down rather than at her, watching as a man in an expensive suit sat down by the fountain as well. “I want to know if you can.”

“Is this one of your puzzles you're trying to figure out?”

Her voice had been more curious that time, and he'd glanced over, but she had still been looking at him, more calculation than disapproval in her eyes.

“The pieces are all there,” he had said, “I can't put them together, please focus.”

“We shouldn't mess in the Spymaster's business,” she'd shot back, but she had looked down at the two men, who hadn't turned to face each other but sat there, tense, like something was keeping them stuck. Beatrici had made a quiet sound, something thoughtful. “They're talking.”

He hadn't noticed. Her eyes and ears were better than his since the Mark.

“Look,” he'd said, because even if he couldn't see their mouths moving he had been watching Arsenyev for a week now, and this next motion was familiar—he was taking a small package from the other man, slipping it into the inside of his jacket. Beatrici fingers had clenched on the tiles and her eyes sharpened into something cutting and hard.

“Huh,” she'd said, and he could hear her draw the conclusion he'd missed.

She had refused to share it; had told him, searching, whether he'd noticed the other people called Arsenyev by other names, and he had shaken his head, annoyed she wouldn't give him more, asking, his pride not quite letting him plead, for her to tell him what she'd seen; she had only repeated that he should stop getting involved. The man was going to die. He shouldn't be getting attached.

But he _wasn't_ attached—only curious.

So Corvo had taken things into his own hands, and now his ribs were bruised and the back of his head ached with the strain of having pulled too hard on the Void, and he was no longer sure it had been such a good idea after all.

He reached the landing, and upon fitting the key in the lock he found it open.

Corvo had hoped Bea would be out on a job so he could crawl into bed and sleep off the low headache. The voices he could hear through the flimsy front door went quiet as soon as he came in.

“Hey,” he called out into the hallway, working on keeping the truth of what he'd just done off his face. Maybe if he kept quiet about it she would never find out he had momentarily kidnapped the crown's Royal Protector. He crossed the flat, unhurried, and came around into the kitchen. “What were you talking about?”

Beatrici was sat at the table, a still-steaming cup between her hands, and— Ah. Delilah was there.

(The first time they had met, something at the back of his head had told him she was familiar, like... an awareness, thrumming, low-grade but constant. It was something in her face, though it was pared down to clean lines. Her straight and pointed nose. Maybe something about her jaw, too.

Then he had seen the Empress's portrait in the papers again, and the connection had come clear.

The rest had started, as most things did for him, with curiosity; passed through some measure of stalking the ruler of the Isles; ended, unsatisfying, in the old Kaldwin nurses and governesses being too dead or too old to remember anything useful, and Daud's curt denial.

He still wondered.)

She turned to face him, sharp as always in her loose shirt and fitted pants. Her eyes went wide and wicked.

“What trouble did you get into this time?” she asked, rising, a glint of interest in her appraising gaze.

“All sorts,” he quipped back, leaning against the door jamb to keep from swaying. Delilah stalked up to grab him by the jaw and tilt him into the light. He didn't know what kind of sight the cut there was, but Delilah made a low, throaty sound, somewhere halfway between intrigued and the heavy-handed kind of soothing.

“And who ruined your pretty face?” She pulled him back to face her, mouth twisted up into a shark's smile. “I'll have them poisoned, free of charge. There's a painting of you in the works, you know. I can't be having last-minute changes like this.”

This was news to him, but sweetly flattering: he had seen some of her portraits, how lovely they were to look at and how hard to pull away from. He half-smiled, took her hand and brought it to his lips; kissed the knuckles, light, as he met her eyes.

“No one you need to worry about,” he said, bright, and chanced a glance in Bea's direction.

Where Delilah's hand had been artfully draped over his to be kissed, now it clenched on his fingers like a vise, her thumbnail digging into his skin—they were painted green this time, the tips an autumn red. Her eyes narrowed, lips pinching to razor sharpness.

“I'll get you back for that one, you charming little liar,” she said, and let him go. Corvo drew back, unsure whether she meant the lie or the too-showy demonstration, and she pinched his cheek just below the cut so it stung, turning him around when he slapped her hand away. “Now out,” she ordered, “I'll deal with you later. We're discussing business.”

If she didn't want him to hear, then it probably meant she was telling Beatrici about another poor girl in a nightmare situation. For once, he didn't mind being kept out of the loop: from the little he had heard it was always heavy stuff, and right now it meant he could retreat to the room he shared with his sister and deal with the ache pulsing at the base of his head.

Corvo threw off his coat, dropped onto his bed and sank into sleep.

Delilah turned back to Beatrici, who was watching her brother's back disappear into the hall, cup held up to cover her mouth. There was suspicion in the way her fingers curled around the handle; in how she kept looking even as the door closed, tight-mouthed, sipping her tea. Delilah smiled to herself and sat. She would let that suspicion stew a little, let it go bitter. It would make Beatrici's defenses easier to pry open.

“I really don't understand you,” Beatrici muttered, putting her cup down and leaning back in her chair.

“Corvo's a lovely boy,” Delilah said, smile easy.

Beatrici glanced at her, a wry curl to her lips. “You're lovely,” she said, “But I don't know what he sees in you either.”

Delilah gasped, put a hand to her mouth in coy mockery, and laughed. “It's fun. Working things out on each other.” And Corvo was _very_ good with directions when you had a firm enough hand. She liked that about him: the ease with which she could get him to follow her lead, the lack of distrust. Of course, he made up for it by being aggravatingly stubborn in other areas. That unwavering loyalty of his, for one.

“I'm sure,” Beatrici said, clearly deciding to put an end to that conversation. Delilah could push for a little more banter, if she wanted— _We could work some things out, too. Is it sweet you want? I can be sweet. I'm very flexible_ —but she knew it would only finish with Beatrici irritated, not even in the fun, biting way, the kind where Delilah could be a feral thing: just distant and cold, too watchful.

Nowhere near as much as she had been at the start of their acquaintance, of course—if there was anything Delilah prided herself on, it was her capacity to wear people down.

“You never play along,” she sighed, leaning her chin languidly on the back of her hand. “And you wonder why I like your brother better.” There: that edged glance, that was what she wanted, much sweeter than the walls Beatrici usually threw up. Delilah gave her an indulgent smile. “Don't worry. He has his downsides, too. Have you noticed he's keeping secrets?” Ah, and now she was flicking a look at the door again, a barely-there frown betraying her thoughts. Good. “Though it's not like we haven't been doing that ourselves,” she finished, drinking in the fraction of a second of guilt in Beatrici's hands tightening around her cup.

“We were talking business,” Beatrici reminded her, sharp, but didn't meet her eyes as she drank her tea.

Delilah settled back in her chair, self-satisfied. “Of course. I've started work on the spell, which is coming along nicely, and Melina had little trouble joining the Dunwall Tower laundresses and getting me a sample of cloth. She thinks someone saw her take it, however. I doubt she'll be able to stay long enough to get the rest of what I need.” Delilah gave Beatrici a pointed look from below her eyelashes.

“I'll deal with the bones first,” she answered, steady—then her mouth twisted to one side as if in hesitation. “You're sure it has to be—?”

“Intention has weight when you weave a spell. A wolfhound's femur or a rat's skull would bring nothing of value to the magic.” Delilah waved her hand dismissively, and caught her eye again. “All of which means the hair is important, too.” She measured her voice very carefully, letting it soften just enough. “Perhaps it's time...”

“No,” Beatrici snapped. “Not yet. Even when I tell him not to get involved, he keeps—” and she cut herself off, scowling out the window like something beyond the glass had personally insulted her. Corvo had a knack for finding exactly the right moment to bring his sister's doubts to the fore, Delilah mused, almost smiling. She hid it fast when Beatrici turned back to her with eyes narrowed. “And weren't you the one who told me to be careful with him? That we couldn't give him the time to get attached?”

“I never meant we should keep him out entirely,” she lied, reproachful, knowing she wouldn't be called out on it.

Beatrici rarely spoke of the time before she and her brother came to Dunwall, but Corvo was much more forthcoming, and even if he tried to avoid certain parts of his past Delilah was an expert at digging what she wanted out of people. Of course Corvo had to stay out: Delilah knew what trouble his quickly growing affections could bring down on her projects, and above all how much traction it would have on Beatrici; and the day he found out how much his sister had been hiding from him, perhaps it would damage that damned loyalty enough for her to reel him in properly.

“I still think having someone on the inside is our best bet,” Beatrici continued. “If Melina can't stay, don't you have anyone who can replace her?”

Delilah marked a pause.

“Ah,” she said, eyes going wide as though realizing something. “You don't think he can do it.”

It was nearly imperceptible, but Delilah saw her startle; saw her move to deny it, instinctive, then falter, the question settling somewhere behind Beatrici's eyes. She had a deep and abiding trust in her brother's skills, of course—but Dunwall Tower was something else, layer after layer of guards and unmapped territory under constant patrol. Even if they let him in on it, could he do the job?

Delilah let her expression soften, and offered a gentle smile. “It's all right,” she said. “You don't want your little brother hurt. It's what any sister would do.”

Beatrici visibly rankled at the condescension, but words seemed to escape her, and she glared across the table instead.

Delilah repeated, “It's all right,” and set a hand over Beatrici's, brushing the back of her wrist with her fingertips, “I'll have it taken care of. Trust me.”

“Isn't that what I'm doing?” Beatrici asked, looking down at her hand and not moving away. Delilah felt a little thrill at that, somewhere in the vicinity of her heart. She looked like that trust was already too much, like she was asking herself on a loop why she was allowing even this much at all, like she had no idea what was keeping her pinned there, Delilah's hand so light on hers, touching through warmth more than skin.

If Delilah could convince her it was her own feelings—could convince her it was comfort, or pleasure, or _love_ —Delilah would have won.

She stood and rounded the table; touched Beatrici's shoulder, then cupped her cheek, every movement slow, like approaching a wild animal. “Trust me,” she said again.

Eventually, Beatrici knocked her hand away and rose, narrowly avoiding shouldering past her. She pulled on the thick jacket she had left across one side of the table.

“I'll get you the bones by sometime next week,” she said, not looking back, and a moment later Delilah heard the front door close.

She let the smile grow, and placed Beatrici's tea cup in the metal basin that served as a sink.

Their apartment was a small, dusty place, but mostly this meant she had already seen much of what was inside, and knew exactly where to go to find Corvo, not even undressed, sprawled out on top of his bed with his arms curled around his head. He'd have looked like a sweet little boy if she hadn't known how many people he had killed, or what those hands were capable of.

Delilah sat on the edge of his bed and ran a hand through his hair, pulling the ribbon away. He turned into it with a muffled huff of a sound; she smiled.

“Wake up,” she murmured, voice all honey, and dug her fingers in and tugged, vicious.

Corvo arched and hissed, grimacing, and when he lashed out to shove her away she pinned his wrists to the bed above his head and threw a leg over his waist, straddling him, then leaned down until she could almost taste his heaving breaths in her mouth and all he could see was her.

“Delilah?” he asked, bleary, blinking like he couldn't focus.

She hummed, settling in more comfortably on top of him. “I did say I would deal with you later.” When she trailed her hands back down his arms to his chest he kept them still, curved to either side of him. She could feel the beat of his heart, strong and quick, through his shirt. His eyes had drifted down to her mouth. She chuckled, indulgent, and closed the rest of the distance.

He was always warm and pliant, at first. It was one of her favorite things about him: how easy he was to mold, in those first few instants, how trusting before she showed him not to be, and it was the same every time, like the lesson never held. Corvo let himself be kissed, eyes closing—and as soon as he opened his lips, finally ready to come out and play, Delilah pulled back and propped herself up on one arm, ignoring how he winced at her elbow digging into his ribs.

“You don't seem too interested,” she sighed. The confused curve of his mouth turned pinched. “Would you rather tell me what you got up to that has you _so_ exhausted?”

“Definitely not,” he shot back, hooking a hand around the back of her head to bring her down. He pressed their mouths together again, nibbling at her bottom lip, and this time when Delilah let herself open he turned away, brought her down further to nip her jaw and draw a line of wet kisses along her neck. She paused—then laughed, pleased despite the sudden, bitter need to retaliate. He was a quick study.

His other hand had wandered down to her thigh, petting; she let out a breathy hum, bending into the hunger of his mouth, and his fingers pressed a little harder into the flesh of her thigh, and she slid her hands up to his shoulders and dragged her nails across the solid muscles there.

“I'll get it out of you one way or another,” she muttered, then hooked in her fingers and bore down until he yelped.

In one fluid motion he grabbed both her legs and dumped her on her back, the bedframe shrieking under them. His arms were braced either side of her head, his teeth bared in a deliciously low growl, and there were smears of blood high on his shoulders where her nails had pierced the skin. She grinned, and gave a soft, throaty laugh.

His pupils were so lovely and wide, so black. It was really no wonder that the Void gave him those gifts.

“There you are,” she said. “I was wondering where your claws went.” She scratched her own down the length of his arms, light this time, only making a point—but he glanced to the door instead of reacting, a tiny worried frown on his face. “Beatrici went out,” Delilah reassured him, shifting under his weight to remind him where his attention should be, and he had the gall to sit back and poke at the scrapes on his shoulders, brow furrowing harder, whining:

“I'm gonna have to clean those.”

Delilah drew up her leg, planted her foot on his chest and shoved.

“Don't tell me you've gone delicate,” she said, sullen. “Maybe your sister's right to doubt you.”

He was scowling, now, and she sneered back, the most prim furl of her nose she could manage, the bare minimum of emotion his childish display was worthy of, but she wasn't expecting him to grab her by the calf and _pull_.

He flipped her, deft, onto her stomach, and gave her no time to wriggle back up, blanketing himself over her back heavy and hot. Her hands were pinned level with her shoulders, and she could feel his knees between her thighs, sinking into the pathetic mattress, through the cloth of her pants. His breath stirred the short hair at her nape.

“You don't have to get a rise out of me for me to eat you out,” he murmured, disgustingly soft, his lips warm where they brushed her ear.

She canted her hips up, grinding pointedly against him—“Don't I?”—and he laughed, stoking the acid boil of fury decanting in her chest.

“I'd mind that kind of rise a lot less,” he said, still giggling like a schoolboy, and let go of her arms to pull her up onto her elbows—the casual show of strength _was_ a little attractive, she had to admit—then started opening her shirt. His mouth had drifted down to her neck again, biting surface kisses as his hands made quick work of the buttons. Delilah reached back to get a solid grip on his hair and tugged again, less vicious this time, still enough to make his breath catch, make him bite down on the angle of her shoulder, make him press his hips up against hers firm enough to feel how he was growing hard.

Her shirt fell open, let cool air lick down the center of her chest, and his broad hands palmed her ribs, calluses scraping her skin; traced the outline of her breasts, one finger drawing a nail down to her nipple. She bit her lip, inhaling; pulled on his hair again, pushed back into the motion of his hips.

Corvo shook his head to loosen her grip, and she felt his hands draw away, pull her shirt from her pants and wander, curious, to the small of her back.

Delilah whipped around and her nails caught him on the jaw, a sharp red line, before he startled back with a yelp.

“No,” she snarled, but his hands had closed around her hips—she couldn't twist around, and he was pushing her back into the mattress by her shoulder even as she tried to brace with her hands, a steady unrelenting force.

“You know I wouldn't really hurt you,” he said, sounding hurt himself. Delilah tensed, then relaxed—no, he wouldn't, would he, the precious little thing, and even if he did she had many, many ways of getting him back for it.

Still she said, mocking, “Whyever not?” to distract herself from his rucking her shirt up to her shoulderblades, and snarled when he bent to kiss the caning scars lying thinned and ropy across the dip of her spine.

(They hadn't pained her in a long, long time, not since a couple of years after the Tower's kitchen intendant had given them to her for stealing, and she had gotten what vengeance she could for them—but she preferred it when no one could see them, or how far down they went.)

Then Corvo nipped at them with his teeth and she jumped, a noise startled out of her, and finally purred, rubbing herself against the mattress how she could with him between her legs, keeping her from pressing them together.

His hands came back around her waist and she tilted up her hips, making an interested sound, but he was only undoing her belt, and then he finally turned her onto her back again and slid off her pants.

Delilah stretched, arching her back to show off the curve of her breasts, and hummed in satisfied delight as Corvo's eyes wandered down her body, admiring. There was a lovely flush high on his cheeks—a pity that the cut on his face ruined the picture, but she could still drink in the shape of his eyes, how sweetly dark they were, and the dent in his bottom lip where he was biting at it, swollen and red and _very_ inviting. Delilah tucked her leg between his and pushed the sole of her foot against the tent in his pants. He gasped, rocking into it, then looked back up to her with something like reproach in his gaze, and she smirked and stretched again, tilting her head at a coquettish angle. She had a right to bask a little.

Inevitably, his eyes wandered back down to the dark thatch of hair between her legs, and the poor stupid boy whined when she rubbed her thighs together, feeling how wet she was getting. She huffed, lightly amused.

“Get undressed,” Delilah ordered, waving a hand.

You couldn't fault his enthusiasm: Corvo stood and threw off most of what he was wearing as fast as he could, letting it all drop haphazardly on the floor, and only bothered with his socks when Delilah looked down at them with a pinched and disapproving mouth—then he leaped back to the bed, crawling up between her legs, and she caught his bright, open face between her hands.

His mouth opened under hers with a thin whine that she swallowed, starving, taking every ounce of his desire as her due. She bit him and he shuffled even closer, so well-trained, and her fingers clenched in his hair and shoved him down.

“Get to work,” she told him, breathless, and he obeyed with a moan and a lapping, eager mouth.

Delilah leaned up on one elbow to watch him, watch how he parted her with his fingers and lipped at the slick red edges of her, how he—ah—rubbed those fingers through the slick as he slid his tongue up to trail around her clit. She let her head fall back and moaned, luxuriating, her whole body prickling with goosebumps, little shocks of pleasure twinging up her arms and legs. He was licking at it now, light teasing flicks followed by long, drawn-out pressure, and she could hear him starting to touch himself but allowed it, uncaring as long as his mouth was on her.

When he seemed to slow, her fingers tightened in his hair and yanked.

“Focus,” she hissed, and he fell back to it with a high whimper she could feel echoing up through her as his mouth closed on her and sucked, hands coming up to her hips and gripping tight, holding her steady. She reached down to touch herself, to push past the wet curve of his lips and get two fingers around the hard bud of her clit and stroke, panting, and he immediately moved down, messily kissing between the lips of her cunt, his tongue nudging at her hole, his nose pressed up against her fingers, and when she came with a high, shocked noise she pushed him down to grind against his face through the aftershocks.

He came back up to his haunches a wreck, hair wild and face shiny with slick from his nose to his chin, but he only absentmindedly wiped it away with one hand then curled that hand around himself, groaning. Delilah sat up gradually, taking her time as he set himself a punishing pace. He was panting, shivering all the way to his shoulders, leaning back on one hand but his eyes were closed like he was trying to remember how it felt to be so close to her when she shook.

The thought tugged her forward, and she teased her nails up the flexing length of his thighs. The noise he made when her fingers stopped either side of his cock was satisfyingly pleading. Delilah hooked an arm around his neck and pulled him down close enough that she could kiss him, though his mouth was faltering and uncoordinated under hers, the rest of him too focused on the cock between his legs. She slid her nails to the junction of his hip and thigh; tapped them, wickedly pleased at his gasp, against the velvet skin of his sack; curled them, finally, around Corvo's jerking hand, and squeezed.

He whimpered very prettily into her mouth when he finished on himself, she thought, come streaking up his belly. She pushed him and he dropped, unresisting, onto the bed. His legs unfolded on the mattress; he lay there, limp and satiated, and she observed him with a sense of proprietary pride. Her eyes lingered on the scratches at his shoulders and jaw; on the contrast of her nails against the tender skin of his thigh.

So loose. Pliant. A lingering idea was lighting up at the back of her head.

She reached down to touch herself again, ran her fingers through the slick, the ones whose nails she had clipped down short, and eased her way into the vee of Corvo's thighs. His eyes blinked open, curious, to watch her from where he lay sprawled and open.

He arched into the touch with a contented sigh when she pressed her wet fingers against the sensitive spot behind his balls, then shuddered a little, breath hitching, when she slid them lower and pushed up against his hole—but his eyes were steady on hers, his face flushed, and no part of him seemed to be saying no.

“I should really get that leather commission done,” she said, low, rubbing a finger against him, “So I can fuck you like I've been wanting to.” She pushed in the tip and his eyes screwed shut, a fluttery little noise bursting up out of him. Had he never been touched like this? Perhaps it was because _she_ was the one touching him—the thought sent a little thrill of pleasure through her—or perhaps he was only playing the coy, blushing virgin, but if that was the case she wouldn't hold it against him. It was a wonderful show.

“Would you like that?” she asked, her voice gentle, as she pulled her finger out and wiped it through the come smeared up his stomach. “Being split open?” Her finger slid back in, unimpeded, to the second knuckle, and Corvo drew his arms over his head to hide his face and gave a stuttering moan. “Being filled, still shivery and sensitive?” She drew out, pushed back in with both fingers, and no, he wasn't new to this at all, so easy to open, so trusting.

Delilah moved up his body, fingers still working inside him, until she could push back his arms and look him in the face, brush the unkempt hair from his eyes. She crooked her fingers inside him and dragged them back out and he arched with a sharp and lovely cry.

“You _would,_ wouldn't you,” she purred, but her lips were pulled back like it might be a snarl and his eyes were so wide on her, wide and lovingly dark, “You'd love to get pinned down and fucked, you want to be _used,_ ” and she thrust her fingers in hard, making him jolt, making him tremble as she teased his rim with the edge of her nail. “What a pretty little slut,” she groaned, deigning to bend down and kiss him again, and the sounds he made as she licked into his mouth were beseeching and ecstatic.

“I could make something wonderful out of you,” she sighed into his ear as he rolled his hips, meeting the motions of her hand. “If only you became one of my coven. If only you were mine.” She pressed her fingers up inside him and he quaked, legs edging further open. His mouth was wet and open, his tongue red under the pressure of her thumb. “When you join me I will tend and grow you into a beautiful, thorny rose, Corvo,” she promised, and he writhed in her arms.

She liked him, really, this too-sweet, loyal boy, it was only that she wanted his loyalty for herself—so she wouldn't break him too hard. One of the first times she had taken him to bed—an overall easy seduction—he had looked at the scars on her arms and there had been so many questions stumbling over themselves to fall out of his mouth: had she always been Delilah? Had she chosen the name? Her name, and the flowers she dressed herself in, were they because of the scars? He had said they looked like vines, like a tangle of climbing roses. She had smirked and called him a clever boy; later, when they had started playing rougher, he had bitten her scars and she had bitten back harder, thinking him a little mongrel dog and wanting him so much for herself. She could make something real out of him. Something seen.

He came a second time, sweating and breathing hard, though she had hardly touched his cock, and as she cradled him against her breast she said, “You know I would never doubt you, don't you? You know I see what you can do, how _much_ you can do. You know I see how much you could _be_ , beyond the Mark you share with her.”

He looked up at her through the frizzing cloud of his hair, and what she saw was uncertain, and hopeful, and just a little expectant. She let herself feel victorious.

Then Corvo asked, “Did you ever have a sister?” and the feeling curdled, sour, in her chest.

She watched him with cold eyes for a second, searching for a tell, something to show her what might have put the idea in his head. She doubted it could be Beatrici; Corvo may have a talent for acting, but his sister was far too blunt to ever manage to hide anything from her, let alone lie.

He seemed earnest, though the glint of hope was losing strength by the second.

She offered him her hollowest smile.

“I did,” she said, and stroked her fingers through his hair, nails rough against his scalp, “But that girl hardly matters anymore.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Corvo looks at his problems and decides he needs different ones
> 
> (in which i also make a VERY stupid reference to a fic by thegrumblingirl, who is AMAZING and deserves much praise for dealing with my ecstatic self-commentary while this fic was happening)

In the beginning it had taken time for Corvo to start understanding the bonecharms' singing, to hear the words under the garbled hiss, but these days he held the broken spars of bone and they whispered it all, low and friendly—everything they had witnessed, into his ear.

This one could make you disappear if you held still long enough, though it was at a price. It had belonged to a spy—a spy for the crown—and Corvo had stolen it from the man's house while Beatrici killed him in his bed. Then they had set fire to the kitchen, and made sure the place burned down.

Sergei Arsenyev was dead, and Corvo held all his secrets in his palm.

There were... a lot of them, he realized, having listened, half-focused, to a long murmurous stream of them and emerged three hours later with information still coming—but a few in particular kept coming back, the charm-voice sharper, like it wanted him to know.

 _He carries the crate,_ it said, _and he does not know the things inside, but they rustle and chitter and claw at the wood._

_He carries the crate. He carries the crate, and he knows them now, knows what they will look like streaming into the gutter. He does not know why. He goes down Clayturn Road, and he carries the crate._

_Corporal Terrence Fitz takes the coin and forgets he was here. Doctor Senbaum drinks the poisoned wine, and he burns her report to ash. There is a shape on the other side of the street and the blood coming from its eyes looks black. He hopes this is the last time he is told to come here and deliver rats to no one._

Clayturn Road—that, he knew: a street in a district on the other side of the river, just as poor as the one they lived in. A group of Wrenhaven smugglers used to sell their wares out of a sham storefront there. He had gone back recently only to find them gone.

( _He carries the crate,_ it whispered, and he tried to tune it out.)

Puzzle pieces again. Beatrici would see it, he was sure, she had always been the best at seeing the pattern and putting everything together—all he had was gut instinct telling him something was wrong.

What use were crates full of rats? And the doctor, what did she have to do with it? He had never heard of her: she could have been anything from an academic to a back alley surgeon.

Corvo sat on his unmade bed, the bonecharm cradled in his hands. It was still talking. The words sounded less urgent, though, fading as his focus dropped.

The front door opened and closed, followed by the familiar sounds of a coat being shaken dry and hung up. Steps crossed the hall, paused in front of the shut bedroom door, and went on.

He should tell Beatrici. She would be angry at him for it—she had told him already to stop looking into whatever he thought he saw and he hadn't, had done the opposite, really—but maybe if he layed out all the information, if he got her to understand there was something underneath it all, got her to see it, maybe then they could work on this together, like they used to—

(It had been almost a game, pitting the gangs and their members against each other, finding sore spots and imbalances and rivalries and turning it all into leverage. That was how they'd started out, how they had made themselves a space in the constantly turning tide of the Morlish underworld. They had been seamless, one machine, like they were supposed to be.

When had the gears sprung? Was it the name, the Ghost? Something else? He wasn't sure. All he knew was what he had been trying too hard to ignore: his sister was leaving him behind, and he was scared of being alone.)

He walked into the kitchen and Beatrici was waiting, an unfolded letter in her hand. She held it out for him.

“New contract from Burrows,” she said as he took it.

There was something off about her, but he ran his eyes down the page, frowning at the payout.

“That's low for a kill—” Then he reached the target's name and his insides turned to a small, frozen lump in the middle of his chest.

He stared, eyes fixed. Swallowed. His eyes flicked back up to her, and found what had tipped him off: not anger, but fear, lodged deep in the stiffness of her jaw.

“We can't do this job,” he said. _I don't want to do this job._ There had been times where they refused contracts, for being too risky or, more often, not paying enough, and there were definitely grounds to say no to this one for that reason alone—

“We have to,” Bea snapped back, rising to her feet. “It's not the first letter I got. The Spymaster has _eyes_ on us, Corvo. He knows where we live.” Corvo felt the hairs rise on his arms. “If we don't take his money and do what he says—”

“But how? We're always so careful—”

“Are we, Corvo?” she asked, damnably accusing, and his mouth shut with a click.

Daud must have told Burrows—of course he had, what else had Corvo expected?—but then, why wasn't there a manhunt out for the Ghost right now? There had been no sign, nothing, or Beatrici would have known before, so maybe— maybe the Royal Protector hadn't told, maybe he'd asked his own annoying questions, maybe he'd done nothing at all and this was a precaution because any spymaster would be a paranoid asshole, maybe someone had seen Corvo on the rooftops—

 _This is why you don't run any operations, Corvo,_ said the recriminating little voice at the back of his head, and if he listened close it might start sounding like Beatrici so he didn't.

She had to know, now. She wouldn't be looking at him like she expected a confession if she didn't.

He stared back at her, feeling useless, not knowing what to say.

Beatrici turned away with a growl. “Outsider's fucking balls, what did you think you were _doing._ ”

He hadn't been thinking— _That's always the problem with you,_ he imagined she'd say—only following instinct. It had worked, in the past, but everything seemed to fail him now.

“I needed— I was putting things together,” he said, knowing he sounded weak, that it was nowhere near enough to be considered an excuse. Beatrici rounded back on him, furious.

“This is about Arsenyev again, isn't it.”

“Not just— It's _important—_ ”

“—How far are you going to take this? You attacked the Empress in the _middle of the day—_ ”

“—Not the Empress— There's something going on here, in the northern districts, I have names—”

“—I told you to stop sticking your nose where it doesn't belong, stop _getting involved,_ Corvo—”

“What else am I supposed to be getting involved in!” he shouted. “Check the address, Corvo, watch the patrols, Corvo, _it's not your business, Corvo!_ Do you even want me around when I'm not running errands for you?” He could feel, mortified, how his eyes were going hot and prickly though he knew he wouldn't cry, he was sure, he couldn't cry, not now. He didn't want to be the little brother right now.

Beatrici stared at him, mouth open, shock and rage and things harder to recognize fighting for control. “Of course I—”

He glanced down at her Mark, stark black on the back of her hand, and she fell silent, and he knew he had made a mistake.

He could have pinpointed to the exact second the moment the rage won out.

“You think it's because of the—!” She threw up her arms, voice pitched and wounded, breathing hard, and the look on her face was close enough to betrayal that shame twisted inside his ribs. “I can't— I _cannot_ fucking believe— You're my _brother,_ Corvo, why would you even—”

She slammed a fist on the table hard enough for its legs to rattle against the floor; braced herself on it like the outburst had drained everything out of her. The contract had crumpled in his hand. In the silence, he flattened it out and folded it back up, clammy fingers sticking to the paper.

(He hadn't meant to look down. He had known the kind of pain it would bring—but then he'd known because he'd thought of it, because he _had_ meant what the look said even if he hadn't wanted Bea to know. If she went further than a city's width from him she would lose everything the Outsider had given her, and what else, really, did she need him for?)

“I'm not having another Gallagher happen,” she said, final, once her breaths had steadied. “The Royal Protector's going to die whether you like it or not, so you have to stop... _doing_ this.”

Corvo stared down at the floorboards, and even as he failed to cry he felt like the stupid kid brother all over again. He wanted to tell her this wasn't another Gallagher—wanted to tell her that the reason he didn't like this was the risk, the surveillance, the amount of guards in the Tower, the shitty compensation, but all of it would be a lie. He didn't want the Royal Protector— He didn't want _Daud_ dead. He didn't deserve it.

( _No one ever deserves it,_ said the voice, and the part of him that was done with being needled hissed at it and said, _Well I don't deserve to have to kill him when I—_

Fuck, he'd gotten attached. Beatrici was right.)

“We have some time,” she continued, running hands through her hair. She looked tired, he realized, maybe even exhausted. Was it recent or had he just not noticed? “Enough to find a place out of the way. We'll finish this job, and then we'll go into hiding.”

“What about the other contracts?” he asked. Everything in him had flattened out, but he couldn't stop trying, couldn't let it all fall apart in his hands like a broken plate. “We can't just skip out—”

Beatrici stepped right up to him, scowling, the force of her presence almost pushing him back. “Once this job's done we'll be liabilities,” she hissed. “Taking a contract on a spy or a minor aristocrat is nothing. But the crown's Protector? You think he won't consider having us taken out after that?”

“We know how to defend ourselves,” Corvo said, frowning. “Even with eyes on this place, he might not know the Ghost is two people.”

“You think that matters? He'll burn us like we burned Arsenyev.” He flinched—she hadn't scoffed, but it was hard not to hear scorn in her tone anyway—and she hesitated, then backed off a step. “If we survived this long despite the price on our heads,” she added, softer, “It's because no one really knows who we are. But he _does,_ and out of everyone in this city he's the bastard we should be most afraid of.”

She took the contract from him; slipped it into her pocket. It would be going with the rest of their files in the cabinet.

As she passed him, he said, “Bea,” and she stopped. He swallowed. “... I don't know what I did wrong.”

She looked at him, flat and worn out. “How about going off half-cocked with no backup plan?”

His lips pinched, but he returned the glare. “You stopped talking to me way before then.”

He had expected a reminder, something scathing and impatient—not the flash of guilt he saw go through her.

“I'm—” she started, and in the next second she turned away. “Delilah and me, we're—working on something. It's been taking it out of me. I'm sorry I've been distant.” Even as she said the words, she was closing herself off again: not facing him, looking elsewhere.

He stared after her, helpless. “Why haven't you—”

“Later,” she said, no longer angry but unwilling to listen. “We finish the job, and we survive—then we'll talk about it.” She cut him one last look that seemed to plead for him to trust her. “Soon, okay? I'll tell you about it soon. We just have to survive first.”

He thought, _Aren't you tired of surviving?_ and it stopped him in his tracks as he watched her leave to file the contract away. Surviving had been the be-all end-all of their existence, back in Karnaca, and most of the way through the time they spent in Caulkenny, but in all the years here in Dunwall he had thought they were past it. They had a reputation; they had cash, and a place to stay; they even had allies, however much Bea warned him against trusting people in their kind of career too deeply.

Of course she wouldn't be tired of surviving. It was what she'd always done, what she had strived and sweated and bled for, years and decades of surviving. Did he want to throw that away? Was that what she'd seen in him, what had pushed her to keep him at a distance? Was she afraid he would bring her down with him?

He bit the questions back. At best it would make her angry all over again, and he was tired of putting his foot in his mouth, and at worst— at worst she would look at him with the cold in her eyes he saw, sometimes, when she was hunting her target down, and he would be even less than the little brother she used to tug around by the wrist.

He sat in the kitchen chair she had left empty. The new contract was a problem. He didn't want another Gallagher, either.

That whole thing had happened at the end of their stay in Morley. Siobhan Gallagher had been a guard with good hair and a pretty face, posted every morning in front of the place Corvo was staking out for a high-end robbery, and when Corvo had gotten curious and come up to her to talk she had been charming, too (and, he found out a little later, a deft hand at kissing). He had enjoyed himself, and hadn't let it distract him too much, and he had been certain, like any kid driven by his impulses, that that would be that.

Beatrici and he had both gone in to make their way through the house faster—if they could get their hands on something easy to miss, it was always a nice bonus—and he had taken the upstairs, darting in and out of rooms, confident. The sharp inhale behind him had stopped him short.

He had turned, crossbow out, and of course it had been her. He saw her shape his name, saw her go for her sword. He bolted.

Her cry of thief had brought an entire garrison storming in; he and his sister had escaped, though just barely, without what they had gone there for, and once they were mostly safe behind a rooftop cornice Beatrici had turned to him and hissed for him to explain.

“Gallagher saw me,” he'd said, and her eyes had narrowed. “She was one of the guards outside.”

“Why didn't you kill her?”

“I knew her,” he had answered, simply, stupidly, and Beatrici had been right to look at him like that was no excuse—but it hadn't changed how he wouldn't have done it anyway.

She had smacked him upside the head and told him, “Next time, you shoot. You're the important one here,” and he had loved her for it, and been ashamed, and everything inside him had screamed _no._

A week after that they had been on their way out, to Dunwall. He had been too panicked in the moment to erase his face from Gallagher's head.

In Dunwall, in their little flat, he crossed his arms on the table, staring into the whorls of the wood, thinking. He didn't want another Gallagher, no—didn't want to be faced with that choice. Daud had been fun, before he knew what Corvo was, and even after—even with the vinegar he spat when Corvo assaulted his Empress's convoy in broad daylight, he had let him go. Hadn't given him away, hadn't spoken of the Ghost at all, or Beatrici would have heard of it all before now through much more public ways, like a citywide announcement, or a squad of Watch guards shooting in their door.

Kill something he cared for, kill it in cold blood, eye to eye in a staged attack on the Empress—or face death. What kind of choice was that?

There had to be a better way.

*

“The guy from the pub came by,” Galia had told him, handing over an envelope. When Daud had looked up at her, fingers hesitating on the fold, she'd shrugged. “I looked. Nothing inside but a letter.”

Now he was braced against his desk, eyes riveted on the untidy scrawl. Some ink had smudged under his thumb.

The first line said: _You told me to write a letter next time, so here it is,_ and a part of him wanted to laugh, because when had he ever implied there should be a next time at all?—but the rest of him was cold with branching scenarios and calculations, action and consequence unfurling at the back of his mind.

This was what he got for so blatantly challenging the Spymaster, he supposed.

It had been a hectic week and a half, what with the uproar in the newspapers and the Empress under temporary lockdown.

Of course they questioned him when he returned with smears of blood down his face and a shallow stab wound in his side, but he had lied and obfuscated in the way he knew best, truth layered over convenience: whoever it was had somehow taken him elsewhere unseen, and they had fought, and he hadn't gotten a good view of their face. A witch, probably. They had escaped.

 _Why target you?_ they had asked, and he had answered, _They had a crossbow,_ showing the hole in his hand. _Could have been going for the Empress, and I got in their way._

_Then why not kill you?_

_I have a reputation,_ he had said, and grinned. Most people didn't like that. _They had a better chance of escaping than of killing me._

As for who the witch was, there were plenty in Dunwall, suspected or otherwise, and far too many for him to take a guess at who it might be.

He very carefully did not look in the Spymaster's direction.

He had never much liked Hiram Burrows—the man was snide, dismissive, and terrible company, all of which Daud had been called himself on multiple occasions, but above all he was the height of aristocracy: a weasel bloated with its own unearned vanities. From what Daud had seen, the only part of the man's job he couldn't do would be the one that involved rubbing shoulders with the rest of Dunwall's so-called elite, and that more out of principle than a lack of capability. Still, he had lived and let live, since the Spymaster regularly proved his worth.

Less so, recently. The reports of sickness in the northern districts had come in late, too late for the measures Jessamine would have otherwise put in place, and they had been forced to isolate what they could and hope it would work—but already there had been signs of it spreading through the outskirts, dangerously fast. Burrows had settled the blame on the Watch garrison posted nearest the first outbreak, and those of his agents there who hadn't considered the events important enough to bring to his attention.

Daud had scoffed. The man was an obsessive—Daud knew his systems too well to think his people would ever lack that initiative—but Jessamine had told him that one mistake, even if Burrows was involved, was not an arrestable offense; then, her smile wry, to keep his paranoia in check.

It didn't feel like paranoia—it felt like that moment in the dark, just before a shape you thought was background started to move. Still, he hadn't pushed the issue. He had taken to wondering whether he should have. By now the mistake was growing to troubling proportions, and the Empress could hardly afford to question her Spymaster when she needed all the help she could get keeping any greater consequences at bay.

Someone wanted Burrows' spy dead, however. To send a message? To quiet him? Whoever it was had money, if they were hiring the Ghost for it. He should warn Arsenyev, tell him there was someone after him—but the problem with the lie he had built was that it hardly gave him reason to know any of this, and he didn't have Arsenyev's address, and if he asked for it then Burrows would want to know _why_ and that was something Daud did not care to tell him.

He did not ask himself too deeply why that was. Having a conversation with a known criminal that did not end in life-threatening wounds would be, in itself, more than enough for a man like the Spymaster to suspect treason, and Daud had too many mysteries at hand to be getting locked up and interrogated.

Mysteries such as the Ghost's other question.

From what he knew, Emperor Kaldwin hadn't had any bastards—or at least he hadn't had any officially recognized—but he could remember, thinking back, the strange tension that existed between the Emperor and his wife, all the more visible to him once Daud became the heir's Royal Protector. Had there been rumors? There might have been; he had never much listened to that kind of thing.

Left to his own devices, Daud would have put the whole box of snakes aside, but now that he had cracked open the lid the need to know harangued him through the day, aggressive. He spent the better part of a morning trying to think of a tactful way to broach the topic, and finally decided Jessamine knew well enough how little he gave a shit for him to ask straight out, over lunch, whether her father was unfaithful.

She looked at him for a long, silent minute, her fork hovering above her plate. Possibly he could have chosen a better time to bring it up than when she had her mouth full; the servants had gone, at least. That was a mercy.

She put her fork down and joined her hands under her chin, eyes cool and penetrating.

“I asked myself the same question once,” she said, and the way she said the words made them hang in the air, poised, “When I was much younger, and he was still alive.”

However little Daud cared for the aristocracy's sideways manner of talking, he knew Jessamine, and the underlying question there was clear—why now? He hesitated, wondering which part of the mess to bring forward first.

She must have taken his silence for reluctance: her eyes closed, and she sighed, the line of her shoulders loosening a little.

“I've been thinking of him too,” she admitted, and Daud straightened against the wall in surprise. “The break-in was a shock.”

Oh— Of course—

“I apologize,” he said, rough. “In that light, it's a worse question than I thought.”

What had happened at the Kaldwin Mausoleum had completely escaped his mind—he'd had more important things to brood over the last few days—but he'd forgotten to consider how deeply it might affect her, since it was her father's bones that had been disturbed.

“It's fine,” she said, the sharpness in her voice a little less controlled, “It might as well come out now, when everything is being stirred up again,” but she was watching him close now, curious, and he realized what he'd told her without meaning: that there must be another, stronger reason for his interest. Still she allowed him his silence, turning thoughtful. “It was long ago, but I remember finding it strange how Mother and Father spoke of their... of my sister. Like— Mm.”

“Like a deal?” Daud said. Back then, he had thought it was part of the royalty's alien way of thinking, marriage as a contract, alliances made and upheld or avenged in blood—and it hadn't been any of his business, anyway.

“Like a truce,” Jessamine answered. A smile curled the corner of her mouth, soft. “They conceived her when the Protector tryouts started. I believe it helped them come to a decision, somehow.”

Daud grunted, somewhere between amused and uncomfortable. “What about—” he started, and stopped himself before coming out with a word like 'bastards'. He _did_ know there were limits. “Were there any kids, who could have been...”

He grimaced, and Jessamine saved him from saying something unfortunate for the second time in an hour by speaking up.

“No one would have told me if there were,” she said, the curve of her eyes teasing—then her gaze drifted, and she frowned, like something had only just occurred to her. “There was... There _was_ a girl, a playmate I used to have. My father was kinder to her than the other servants' children, but there was an accident and she and her mother disappeared.” She touched her hand to her mouth, brow furrowed and eyes troubled. “I'd forgotten about her.”

“Do you remember her name?” he asked.

Jessamine looked across the room, alighting on paintings, on oiled, gleaming cabinets, as though searching for inspiration. “I think, a flower... Dahlia? Delilah,” she said, finally. “Her name was Delilah.”

Daud made an absent note of it in the back of his head, and Jessamine turned back to him with a sigh that sounded exactly like the end of a good friend's indulgence.

“Daud,” she said, and he caved like wet paper.

“I lied about the witch.” Her eyebrows went high, but aside from that she didn't seem too surprised—must have suspected something, then, even if she trusted him enough to keep it to herself. “He didn't just run. He had questions for me. One of them was about any... bastard sisters of yours,” he said, pointed, and saw understanding settle like silt in her eyes. If she remembered a girl, too, then the suspicion had more weight.

“ _One_ of the questions,” she prompted, and he nodded.

“The other one was about Sergei Arsenyev.”

Jessamine paused, expectant. “A man you know?”

“One of Burrows' spies. He was working in the northern districts when the trouble started, back in High Cold. I saw the work order on Burrows' desk.” She huffed at that, resigned, and didn't ask him why he had been looking. He always was, anyway. It payed to keep an eye open. “There's a hit out on him,” he added, and she tensed, hands folding together on the table.

“The witch told you this?”

“He's the assassin with the contract,” Daud said, and Jessamine's eyes went wide. Considering how the encounter had ended last time, telling her the man was a killer was perhaps not the best play on his part.

“He let you go with this information?” she asked, tight, and while she didn't sound suspicious yet things were heading in an uncomfortable direction. They had known each other for years; this was a working relationship he didn't want to risk.

“I _did_ fight him off,” he said, dry. “That part wasn't a lie.”

“He is a witch,” she returned, intent, “And now an assassin, and you have information on him,” and Daud realized the lines around her eyes were for worry, not doubt. She feared the assassin would come after him. He held back a sigh; this entire conversation was a mess.

“I was fine.”

“You came back covered in blood,” Jessamine reminded him, sharp again.

He made a face, lips pulling back. “The nosebleed was mostly my fault. He wasn't trying to kill me,” he admitted, and when his common sense piped up that he probably shouldn't be defending a heretic killer-for-hire he pushed it down. Reassuring her was more important right now. “Just threatening me so I'd stop trying to kill _him._ ” Her lips pinched, and that was a smile; it was working.

“So he stole you away for... a few questions?” she asked, and he turned away, dour.

“He has some kind of—fixation,” he said, waving a hand, the meaning of it as vague as his own thoughts on the matter. He felt her skepticism shift to amusement; she was practically radiating the urge to laugh at him. He growled. “Don't ask.” Outsider's ass, calling it a fixation made everything sound worse than him just being a hired killer.

“As you wish,” she said, light. “Have you spoken to the spy?”

“No,” he answered.

Jessamine paused. “Will you tell me the reason why?” she asked, and he thanked her on the inside for trusting him enough to think he would have one, and didn't bother telling her she wouldn't like it. If he was risking someone in her employ, even indirectly, then she knew that already.

“Burrows is involved in something,” he said; her eyes narrowed but she didn't interrupt, “And this is connected with it. You know I don't like how he handled things in the northern districts.”

“You've made it abundantly clear,” Jessamine said, and were she anyone else she would have rolled her eyes.

“Arsenyev was there,” Daud continued, poking at the table like he was tracing a web of correlation. “It can't be a coincidence. I don't know what Burrows is hiding but I'm certain it's incriminating, and killing his spies could be the lead-in to blackmail. If Arsenyev really did do shifty work for him, I don't want him to know that I know.”

“And if he didn't?” Jessamine asked, not quite remonstrative.

“Then it's probably because he's involved in his own dark business,” Daud said, harsh, “And we'd be better off rid of him anyway.”

The skin around her eyes tightened and he knew he'd be hearing more on this later, but for now she seemed to let it go. “There may be something to what you say,” she sighed, picking at her plate. Her food had probably gone cold; he felt a twinge of guilt at the thought. “I want you to find the spy's address, and bring him here. Burrows' secretaries must have it. Tell them the Captain of the Royal Guard wants a word, he would have reason to meet the man; I will inform the Captain of the appointment.”

“And if he's dead already?” Daud asked. It was a possibility: almost a week had passed and there had been no sign of him coming in to the Tower.

“Perhaps he won't be,” Jessamine retorted, then frowned, acquiescing. “If he is... I'll begin the procedure for a formal investigation. Without proof of wrongdoing I don't think I can convince Parliament to allow more than a surface search, but the way Hiram reacts should be illuminating.” She looked up, thoughtful. “Perhaps to distract him you could tell him to look into a woman named Delilah who used to work here as a girl.”

“Understood,” he said—it sounded like a thorough plan—and got up to go, leaving her to the rest of her lunch.

When he went up to Burrows' offices and asked for Arsenyev's address, the man at the desk fixed him with a confused, blinking look, like there was something in the words that didn't register. Resignation settled in his gut.

“What,” he snapped, knowing already what the man would say.

“Arsenyev died end of last week,” the secretary told him. Daud gritted his teeth.

“That's unfortunate,” Daud muttered.

“It was pretty tragic,” the man went on, leaning over to open a drawer and search through an array of files, and the only thing that kept Daud from turning on his heel and leaving was a biting need to know what he was looking for. “There was a fire in his neighborhood. An old woman died too, I think, from the smoke.” He pulled a folded newspaper page from a file marked with the letters S Ar and a series of numbers. “The fire squad got everyone else out.”

Daud stared down at the paper. “You kept the article about his death?”

“Lord Burrows likes us to be thorough,” the secretary said, meek, but Daud had already stopped listening, a conclusion drawing itself before his eyes. He may have found the aristocratic brand of social maneuvering distasteful, but if there was one thing he knew, it was threats—and this wasn't one. You didn't send a message to someone by making a death look like an accident, much less try to blackmail them; and that meant Arsenyev's murder wasn't meant to be a message, it was meant to be hidden, his death was the whole of the point, and _that_ told him the order had come from inside the Tower.

He nearly barreled into the Spymaster coming out the door. The man sneered as he drew himself up.

“If you feel the need to speak to me,” Burrows said, nasal, “You can make an appointment.”

“Just had a question,” Daud shot back, glaring, a steady, unrelenting force of a look that, he'd been told, made people think he might like to pry them apart. After a few seconds, Burrows looked satisfyingly discomfited.

“What was it then?” he snapped, impatient.

Daud didn't waver. “Already got an answer,” he shot back, pointed, and went on down the hall.

Now he had a letter in his hands. A letter from the Ghost of Dunwall. From a hired killer.

Hired to kill him? … Could be. Burrows definitely had the coin to hire a famous assassin twice. The Ghost might also have more questions, and be foolish enough to think this time would go better than the last.

Or he might have more information, and _that,_ Daud was willing to bet a little flesh and blood for. He turned back to Galia.

“Find me Rulfio,” he ordered. “I have a favor to ask.” Then, after a second's thought: “Maybe tell Curnow I'm going to be getting into trouble, too.”

The grin grew on her face, infectious, and she laughed.

*

Daud's answer had told the Ghost _tonight, on the East end of Kaldwin's Bridge,_ to give the bastard less time to prepare anything like an ambush; Rulfio had been posted up in the struts, flat on his belly somewhere with his crossbow pointed down, since early afternoon. If things went sour, he'd have a chance to shoot the assassin—and if he missed then Curnow was waiting to bring in a squad of his men and cut off the bridge's exits.

He had expended much less thought considering what would happen if things _didn't_ go sour, but he would deal with that if he got there.

The sky was getting dark; Daud had wandered onto the overlook jutting out from the bridge, keeping to the shadows, trying not to stand in a clear line of sight from the shore. Damp wind wailed through the railing, and there were storm clouds roiling West of the city, great black beasts, scudding closer.

He heard nothing until the voice spoke up, almost drowned out by the river's low roar:

“Daud? It's me.”

Too close for comfort, but he couldn't exactly accuse the Ghost of sneaking up if he was literally announcing his presence. Still, he pressed his back to the metal wall of the observation deck and closed his hand around the hilt of his sword.

“Come out here,” he answered, eyes sweeping between the door and the bridge's structure overhead.

The Ghost appeared, between one blink and the next, in the middle of the overlook.

Daud startled, cursing—almost fumbled his sword like the basest novice.

“Don't _do_ that,” he snarled when the Ghost turned to face him, his heart pounding. It was a miracle Rulfio hadn't tried to shoot him; either that, or he'd already been dispatched, but Daud would bank on his old second's steady hand before anything else.

The Ghost raised his hands, looking sheepish. “Sorry.”

Daud let his sword arm drop. He had a number of reasons to—the man had spoken first, had given up his position, had made no move to attack—but mostly that stupid half-smile made him look like a boy caught out in a prank, and now it was that much harder to believe he was dangerous.

That, in itself, was a danger, and no reason to let down your guard. Daud knew this. He did so anyway.

“So you _do_ know how to write,” Daud quipped, careful not to look him in the eyes.

“And you read my letter,” he answered. Daud almost glanced up to his face—it was something about his tone, open, nearly hopeful, a little scared, Void-damned _expressive._ He was either very good at creating a false sense of comfort, or the worst assassin Daud had ever met.

Daud grunted. “Move closer to the railing,” he said with a wave of his sword.

“You going to push me over?” the Ghost asked, sounding amused.

Daud bit back a _maybe_ and said, “Do it and I'll consider listening to your _urgent_ news.”

“Okay,” the Ghost said, and obeyed, too easy. He should be in clear view for Rulfio, now. Daud glanced around to the observation deck, suspicious, but seeing nothing he approached until there remained only a few feet of space between them.

He leaned on the railing, keeping a close eye on the other man's hands. “Well?”

“Burrows wants you dead,” the Ghost said, and Daud nearly choked.

“What!” His sword was up again, ready to block an attack, but the Ghost was just standing there, rummaging in the pockets of his own coat only to pull out a sheet of paper covered in familiar handwriting. Daud snatched it from him before he even had a chance to hold it out, scanning the words, feeling something come over him.

It wasn't fear, no: he had long accepted that being a target was a part of the job. Elation, though, might come close. He could hardly believe Burrows had betrayed himself so inescapably deeply, and that he had the proof right here, in his hands, with hardly any effort on his part. Fuck the formal investigation. He much preferred the _knowing_ Burrows was rotten to the bit where he struggled to get the evidence together.

“I have other information, too,” the Ghost was saying.

“Information?” Daud asked vaguely, still marveling.

“Arsenyev knew things.” Daud snapped back to attention, narrowly avoiding the Ghost's eyes. “I... got him to tell me before he died.”

“Before you killed him,” Daud corrected, merciless. “An old woman, too. I imagine she had nothing to do with it.”

The other man twitched, hand jerking up to the back of his neck and scratching nervously. He breathed in deep, then held it, saying nothing. Good. Nothing he might say would help, and it wasn't even that Daud much cared. He mostly found it sloppy.

“What kind of information?” he asked. The contract should be enough to put the Spymaster behind bars, at least long enough for Daud to find more, but he had to ask: “Do you have proof?”

“No.” Disappointing, but he couldn't say he was surprised. Arsenyev probably hadn't left much of a paper trail, and what might have been there must have burned in the fire. “But I have names, places—someone in the City Watch, a doctor, uh... a street in the northern districts.”

Daud perked up, and felt the puzzle finish before the final piece fell.

“There was something about rats?”

His free hand closed around Corvo's arm. He looked him, carelessly, in the eyes.

“You're coming with me to the Tower,” he said, and hauled him back off of Kaldwin's Bridge.

*

He had signalled Rulfio down, had pulled Corvo's hood roughly over his head and told him to shut up and say nothing, and as Corvo nodded Curnow had stepped closer, wary but curious at how things were turning out, and Daud had told him, _Give me your cuffs._

Corvo had jerked when they clicked closed around his wrists, and nothing else.

The storm broke as they reached the Tower. Now Curnow was clearing the hallways ahead of them, and Daud was dragging Corvo behind him, heading in as straight a line as he could to Jessamine's quarters. He barged in without knocking. The Empress and the Captain of the Royal Guard both turned to look at him.

“Please excuse the short notice,” Daud said, his tone too impatient not to damage the very thin veneer of his politeness, as he dropped Corvo into the closest chair, “But this is getting rescheduled to tomorrow.”

Jessamine hesitated—she was eyeing Corvo with something like curiosity—but the Captain stepped up, frowning and deeply offended.

“My Lord,” he said, which was the only concession he made to civility. “What's the meaning of—?”

“Will you leave on your own,” Daud cut in, “Or shall I escort you?”

A shocked silence fell; the Captain turned to Jessamine, his hand too near his sword not to be a threat, but while she shot Daud a quelling glare she also motioned for the man to go. He glared at Daud, and at his prisoner, as he went.

“You realize you'll have to make it up to him,” Jessamine said as the door closed.

“I'll beat him in a fair duel,” Daud retorted, too incensed to bother being humble. “That should cool him down.”

His Empress's lips thinned, but she held off her judgement and looked down at Corvo again, whose face was still hidden in the shadow of his hood. “Is this man why you felt you needed to interrupt my weekly meeting with the head of my Royal Guard?”

The question held a warning, felt both in its words and its tone—clipped, unimpressed—but Daud only drew his sword and gripped Corvo's shoulder as a cautionary measure, then met her level gaze with his own.

“You know the Ghost of Dunwall,” he said, and even as she stiffened and fought the impulse to step back she looked down at the little of Corvo's face she could see. Daud saw her next question in the narrowing of her eyes, and bent to Corvo's level.

“Keep your eyes down,” he said, “Or I'll blindfold you,” and pulled the hood back.

Corvo shook the hair from his face but he obeyed, glancing furtively around the room instead. Daud closed a hand around the back of his neck to keep him from any bad ideas. Such as thinking he might be allowed to move.

Jessamine seemed to be considering multiple avenues of thought, eyes flickering from Corvo to Daud to the unsheathed sword in her Lord Protector's hand. “How—” she started, and stopped. “Who—” The reactive traces of fear were turning to bewilderment; the Ghost of Dunwall didn't seem inclined to move from where he had been put down, or even speak. “Why did you bring him here?” she finally asked.

“Long story,” Daud answered. “Short of it is, he has something to say that I need you to hear.”

What he didn't want to happen, of course, happened: Jessamine zeroed in on him with a look like a bullet in the muzzle of a gun.

“You spoke to him.” Her eyes narrowed. “You met with him, for that purpose. Daud.”

He dived into his pockets for the contract. It just might save him from that glare. “If you want the details I can tell you later—”

“Daud, as your _Empress,_ this sounds like something I need to know.”

He inhaled a tight breath. Right. From where she stood, meeting up with a known assassin probably did sound like bad news. “He's the witch who grabbed me two weeks ago,” he admitted, letting the breath go, and across from him Jessamine sighed. At least she didn't sound too furious. “This morning I received a message saying he wanted to talk. You were busy with the dignitaries, and I saw an opportunity and took it.”

When he looked at her again, her mouth was quirked in a way that said _so that's where you went off to,_ but her eyes were hard chips of blue and very clearly meant _you walked right into what could have been a trap?_ He grunted, acknowledging and denying all at once.

“I brought backup,” he muttered.

Corvo stirred under his hand. “I wouldn't have—”

Daud squeezed his neck until he went quiet, but Jessamine shot Corvo a look, strange and opaque, with an air like she got just before leaning into Daud and telling him what lay three layers below one of her Parliamentaries' words.

“He gave me this,” he said, the contract in hand.

Jessamine took it, starting to read; her eyes grew wide, her face going even paler under the black of her hair. “This is—”

“This is proof. His writing, his signature, his asking to see me dead.”

“Why did you come forward with this?” she asked the man hunched in the chair. The cuffs clinked when he moved, like Corvo had meant to bring his arms around and forgotten they were there.

“... It was my fault,” he answered. “I asked him questions when I shouldn't have.”

“Look me in the eye when you speak to me,” the Empress commanded, cold, but Daud shot out a hand to press his head down before he could.

“No,” Daud said, then explained: “If you do that, he can make you forget his face, or trick you into doing what he wants.”

“Did he trick you into bringing him here?” she asked, immediate and sharp, and Daud had to hold his breath a second to think back and make sure, alarm surging through him.

“... No,” he rasped. “I only looked at him once, when I'd already decided. That wasn't him.”

“As long as I don't look at _you,_ there'll be someone who remembers my face,” Corvo said, meek. “And I promise I won't use the powers, anyway.”

Daud paused. He _did_ remember him now, again: the sharp nose and dark skin, and even the eyes, black pupil on black iris. It had happened without his noticing; when he had looked, Corvo must have refrained from scrambling his brains.

Jessamine nodded her permission when he looked to her. There were few people in the Tower who knew her as well as he did; if the Ghost did anything to influence her, he would notice. Daud grunted, and let Corvo straighten, let him look straight out to Jessamine standing before him cross-armed and livid.

“It's my fault the Spymaster wants him dead,” he said again, meeting her eyes, and her mouth pinched but she let out a long, slow breath, a drawn-out release despite the lingering trace of suspicion, as though she saw something there Daud couldn't. Some part of him wondered whether getting people to believe him was part of his Void-given power, too, or if his earnestness was a truth everyone he came across could naturally see through to.

“Your questions brought an important problem to my attention,” she conceded, looking down at the contract again. Daud had known that she would find it hard to accept her Spymaster had wronged her, but he hadn't counted on how seeing her so troubled seemed to pain him, too. “This should be enough proof for Parliament to open a full investigation—”

“Please,” Corvo cut in, and surprise stopped Daud and Jessamine in their tracks. “You have to make it quick. As long as Burrows is free, as long as he can pay, there'll be someone to do the job—”

“Don't interrupt,” Daud hissed and squeezed the back of his neck again, remembering himself, but Jessamine was already turning to Corvo and snapping,

“Who?”

Corvo swallowed and Daud unclenched his hand, letting him speak. “People I work with,” he said. “More dangerous than me.”

Jessamine's jaw had gone tight, and she turned away with her hands clamped around her arms. “If we must,” she said, tone dark. “There are ways around Parliament, though they won't appreciate my using them. I will fast-track the investigation, but my Spymaster will need to be arrested first—” She glanced at Daud with a dry look— “A task the Captain of the Royal Guard could have helped with—”

“Thought you should hear everything yourself, first,” Daud answered, narrowing his eyes.

Jessamine read the tell like a written word and frowned, going still, dread visible in the tired slope of her shoulders. “Everything?”

“It's worse than you think.” Wanting the crown's Royal Protector assassinated wasn't a minor offence, of course, but she would appreciate this next part even less. As Empress, she knew what her own court was like: the negociations, the backstabbings, the sideways manipulation—true betrayal was another beast entirely. He pushed Corvo forward, prompting. “Tell her what Arsenyev knew, what you told me.”

Corvo gave them what he had, starting with the names: Watch Corporal Fitz, Doctor Senbaum—

“Then it wasn't suicide? Why would he want her dead? And this report—”

—Clayturn Alley, the sick man in the street—

“That entire district was the first one we closed—it's in the middle of—”

—and the crates of rats.

Jessamine turned from Corvo with a hand angled tight against her forehead, the other locked around her elbow. Even with as well as he knew her, Daud couldn't tell whether her quiet loss of composure was out of horror or sheer, destructive fury.

“Doctor Senbaum spoke of the rats first,” Jessamine said, leaning back against the desk, still not coming out from behind her hand. Daud was glad not to be the one that glass-sharp emotion was aimed at, underneath the words. “If her theory— If what I assume we are both thinking is correct—”

“We'll find out once he's behind bars and we have a crack at his records and personal safe,” Daud offered.

“He _wanted_ all those people _dead,_ ” she bit out, raw, sounding entirely unlike herself. “ _My_ people.”

Corvo shifted again and Daud pushed him down, in case he was considering speaking up. She needed a moment; he would make one for her. What was left of the satisfaction from finally having a reason to put Burrows behind bars drained from him at the sight of her, coiled and strained, trying not to snap. After a moment she straightened, though she did not look at them.

“He should still be in his office.” Jessamine was taking back control, pulling the creases from her clothing, removing one of her gloves. She briefly wiped at the skin below her eyes and sniffed once. “It's for the best if he can be detained before he leaves, though undoubtedly he will have heard of the commotion you made when you came in.”

“I was trying not to lose time,” Daud grumbled, but looked down, properly chastised.

“I hope the Captain hasn't left yet,” she continued, ignoring him completely. “He can perform the arrest and bring him to Coldridge for holding until I have launched the investigation and we can search Lord Burrows' house and offices.”

“I can—”

“No, I'll deal with it,” Jessamine decided. Her gaze fell on Corvo, his bent head and twitching hands. “Keep an eye on him, for now. I want him out of the way while the Spymaster is dealt with; then he can have his own cell until morning.” When she left, she was back to looking unruffled, if a little peaky.

The door closed, and Daud let go of Corvo's neck; he had pressed red marks into the skin there, though he was mostly certain it wouldn't bruise—or, at least, not too badly. He took his time jotting down what Corvo had mentioned, tucking the note under the lamp; straightening the papers Jessamine had left in disarray on the desk when he had put an abrupt stop to her meeting; pulling her chair out and across the room, and sitting down, elbows braced on his knees, to completely avoid looking Corvo in the eye.

Yes, the man had walked himself into Daud's reach on his own power. Yes, he had accepted being dragged into the Tower, a place he undoubtedly saw as dangerous, to warn the Empress and her Royal Protector of a very well-disguised traitor in their midst.

No, Daud did not trust him.

Corvo squirmed in his chair, the metal cuffs clicking.

“... So,” he said. “Maybe... take these off? I probably won't stay until morning.”

“You'll stay where we put you,” Daud returned, automatic. “You didn't think you'd be allowed free rein of the Tower, did you?”

“Well—no,” he huffed. “But I'd rather my sister didn't see me in these.”

Daud squinted over at the wall opposite. “Your sister.” Another clink of metal. “One of your coworkers?”

There was a long pause, and when Corvo answered the amount of things he was trying not to say weighed so heavily on the word that it was almost painful to hear. “... Yes.” Strange, that no one had ever been seen alongside the Ghost, then. Every rumor Daud had ever heard had said he worked alone.

“More dangerous than you?”

Corvo hissed, and Daud glanced at his hands, but he hadn't hurt himself; he was only prying at the lock, like he might attempt to pick it with his fingers. Daud reached out and tugged on the chain hard. “Stop that.”

“Yes, more dangerous than me,” Corvo said, subsiding. “I doubt she'll call me back so soon, but she'll probably notice the contract is gone by morning.” When Daud stiffened, shoulders tightening, Corvo leaned back a little, saying, “It's fine, as long as the Spymaster can't pay she won't have reason to kill you,” but out of what Daud had just heard that was very low on his list of concerns.

“Call you back?” he repeated, gaze flickering sideways, and Corvo went very still. Daud was reminded, distinctly, of the first time they had talked, out in front of the bar.

He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but this was the right track—what people would rather he didn't ask was always exactly where Daud believed he should push.

“What is 'calling you back'? Can she speak to you from outside?”

Silence, at first; then a sigh, pushed out through gritted teeth, and Corvo resettled on his chair like he had come to a decision. “No?” he said, sounding the height of confusion, like what he was about to say would make any more sense, and Daud felt a wave of vindictive incomprehension when Corvo went on with, “I'll be where she is instead of here.”

“Your sister can use magic too, then,” he concluded, forgoing the logistics of the thing, and Corvo huffed—quiet and small in a bizarrely comfortable way for someone sitting in the Empress's office with cuffs around his wrists. Daud frowned, resisting the urge to look at his face and see the expression there.

“I'm lucky you didn't get more out of me the last time we met,” Corvo said, all bright self-deprecation.

“It's all on you,” Daud shot back, caustic. “You talk too much.”

“Yeah, well, I like your face,” Corvo answered, irritatingly even, and twisted through the chain of the cuffs with a grunt and a flex of his arms.

Daud's chair clattered to the floor as he bolted out of it, sword up, but Corvo hadn't moved from his, had rather lifted his empty hands, cuffs dangling sad and separate from each wrist. The two conflicting signals—threat, no threat—kept Daud from making a rash first move and trying to cleave him in two.

“I won't hurt you,” Corvo said.

“I'd kill you first,” Daud snarled back, still bristling, skin prickling with hyperawareness, telling himself he should have struck anyway yet dropping into a defensive stance. Corvo slowly leaned back, still sitting, still holding his hands up. It took effort not to look into his eyes. Not to make sure the lack of aggression was clear there, too.

Eventually Daud picked his chair up off the floor and righted it, then sat down again, checking his own memory for the man's face. He couldn't be sure that, in his haste, he hadn't crossed the Ghost's eyes.

“I don't even have anything to attack you with,” Corvo said, his tone skirting reproach. Daud had searched him, of course, before letting him in, and discarded the one knife he'd found, but considering how he had just escaped his cuffs his body itself was a weapon, and there was little Daud could do to separate him from _that_ besides chop his head off. He decided to wait before putting that into effect. For now, Corvo seemed content to sit there and talk, a prisoner mostly in name.

At least Daud could still shoot him if he tried to run. Even if he vanished, Daud would definitely see the door or window opening.

“I'm putting you back in cuffs as soon as I get my hands on some,” he declared, gruff, and Corvo snorted like there was something in that he found funny. Daud glared at the floor and snarled, low, “They'll be harder to _rip off_ if I put three on you at once.”

For a moment Corvo only watched him, intent. It was harder to ignore the staring when Daud was also trying to make sure he was sitting still. He wondered, idle, whether he might hear it when the Captain of the Royal Guard took Burrows in and dragged him screaming to Coldridge, or if he would have to go in the morning to confirm it for himself.

Then he realized he was looking him right in the eyes and jerked his gaze away, teeth bared, frantically checking his own memories again, only to find that everything was in its rightful place.

Daud quieted. Corvo still hadn't tried anything. His hands were free—he could fight, if he wanted, he could even try to run, though Daud would inevitably catch him. He hadn't. Neither did he look afraid. This wasn't a situation Daud had much experience with.

Corvo made a noise he couldn't determine.

“I wanted to say sorry,” he said. Daud could feel him staring, the heat of it a branding iron on the side of his face. “For what I did to you.”

Daud hesitated.

“... Good,” he said, unsure what else he could do. What did an apology change? For most, it was their way of absolving themselves, letting responsibility fall back to someone else—but for all that he resisted it, he felt, unaccountably, just a little calmer.

Corvo took a deep breath, like he was readying himself.

“My name,” he said, “is Corvo Attano. My sister is Beatrici Attano. We're the Ghost of Dunwall.” He took another breath. “There's—a lot more I could say, but mostly, if you have questions about the magic, I'll try and answer them.” He scratched at the back of his neck, looking stupidly self-conscious. “I don't have my mask right now, but if I did I'd give it to you.”

That was—

His knuckles cracked; he'd been clenching his hands together, and now his fingers ached. His nails had cut thin lines into his palms.

It was a lot to unpack.

Multiple lines of thinking vied for his attention, half of them tracking Corvo's minutest movement, the rest screaming at him every possible and crushing advantage he had just been handed on a silver platter. This wasn't even the answer to a mystery he had been pursuing, it was—unasked, unplanned for—not a _I'll tell you this and you won't imprison me_ deal, not a _sorry for being a Void-damned nuisance_ kind of gift, just—

He breathed, centered himself.

 _We're_ the Ghost of Dunwall?

“You— The both of you.”

“Yeah.”

That explained a certain number of things; most notably, how inconsistent accounts of sightings could be. The Ghost had remained a legend a long time after first being seen for that reason alone.

He had first names, he had a family name. If he could keep it together, keep his eyes away, he'd even have a face. The Ghost of Dunwall was notorious; few people didn't know his ( _their, Outsider's fucking cock, they, two people, of course—_ ) crimes, or exploits, depending on who you asked. Even if Corvo escaped, anyone could recognize him. He would be hounded.

“You realize, even if you escape now,” Daud said, slowly, almost testing, “I could have you tracked and taken down.” Silence. Daud clenched his jaw, teeth grinding. “You, or your sister.”

“Maybe,” Corvo said, sounding uncertain but not all that scared. “You'd have a better chance than most people, in any case.”

Daud seethed. “Why are you telling me this.”

“Didn't you want to know?”

He was right: Daud had wanted to know, and Corvo had given him everything like the information was no more than a handshake in passing, some trifling sum changing hands. No. That was wrong—Corvo must know its value—yet he had still offered it up. Easy as breathing.

“What are you trying to pull?” he asked, tight. “What are you fishing for? A lesser sentence? Are you exchanging your sister for yourself?”

“ _No!_ ” Corvo barked, and it rang in the room, short and furious. Daud had leapt to his feet again, wary, looming. Corvo hunched in his chair. “Sorry. No,” he repeated, more calmly, and his raised hands brought Daud back into his seat, tense but listening. “I only— I want you to... to believe me,” he said, and Daud heard the _trust me_ behind those words and curled his lip. “My sister, she's— We're tired of—” He stopped, growled to himself in frustration. “We might need help, and I thought—”

“I don't help _wanted criminals,_ ” Daud snapped, and knew one kid who would have pointed at him and jeered to hear that lie come out of his mouth, but she was an exception, and she had been a child.

“What about reformed ones?” Corvo asked, tentatively light, and Daud snarled. “Alright. I'm sorry,” Corvo said again. He paused, and Daud heard the sound of him swallowing, clear as anything. “I didn't answer your question, two weeks ago. About the contract. Let's say I owed you one?”

It was the worst false reasoning Daud had ever heard.

His lungs felt like they had twisted themselves around his heart, a mess of tissue and hollows. He looked down to his hands, dangling between his knees; could see, out of the corner of his eye, Corvo's hands clasped together not a foot away.

He turned, just enough for his eyes to find the shape of Corvo's body, to travel up his arm, up his neck and the fading marks he had left there, to the red line on his cheek, freshly scarred. He could feel Corvo's eye just above as something almost physical, a force—pulling, or pushing, he couldn't tell.

(The bastard had even offered to explain all of his magic, Voidsakes.)

The scar looked narrow and thin-skinned. His fingertips tingled. He wanted to reach out and touch it.

Then he did, just to show he could, and thought he felt Corvo lean into the press of his fingers; like it couldn't possibly hurt; like Daud hadn't put it there in the first place.

“I did this to you,” he said, even as he realized it was true. It was strange, how memories connected; lose the face with the scar, lose the knowledge you had put it there. “You made me forget.”

“... Now you know?” Corvo answered, somewhere between caught-out and alert. He supposed he did. He knew a lot more, now, than he had tried to, and it itched like sand scraping somewhere tender.

Daud scowled. “If you ever do that again, you'll find yourself out your new lease on life.”

He barely even sounded bitter. _Sentiment._

Daud squared his jaw—and felt the hand on it, angling his face, keeping him from pulling away. Corvo was suddenly much closer than Daud remembered him being.

When Daud got a grip on his coat collar and shoved him off Corvo squeaked like something small being stepped on.

“You shot me,” Daud growled through his teeth, feeling the flush take his face.

“I apologized for that one,” Corvo said, a little strained, bent as he was over the arm of his chair, Daud keeping him at arm's length.

“You _stabbed_ me!”

“You wouldn't have stayed otherwise,” he choked, and the hand on him tightened—he should well know that was the worst possible excuse he could use—but still Daud let him go with a snort, let him right himself, and met his eyes when he straightened up. Corvo noticed, and smiled, the top of his nose wrinkling.

It made terrible, stupid things happen in Daud's chest. He scowled, his mouth twisting down, like that might convince the things inside him to stop.

“I'm sorry I stabbed you, too,” Corvo said, soft in a way Daud decided he found unpleasant.

“It was a light stabbing,” he retorted, dismissive, “I barely felt it,” and looked down to the carpet. Then back up, defiant. Defying what? He wasn't sure. Corvo looked back at him, unwavering, and for a moment Daud closed his eyes to check his memories, then opened them again, and this time the relief was lesser only because he hadn't entirely doubted they would still be there.

“I don't know why I—” he muttered, and stopped himself before he could say _believe you._ He hardly dared to put what exactly he believed into words, or why.

It was the high of having taken down a lurking enemy, that was why. It was the satisfaction of charging right through every official and social protocol he had ever had to learn to navigate the purgatory of the royal court, and the very few consequences that would follow because of why he'd done it.

It was the late hour, possibly.

Corvo said, grinning, “Is it my charm and winning personality?”

Daud sneered. “Definitely mutually assured destruction,” he countered, and Corvo laughed.

It was a high, unrestrained sound; it might have sounded joyous from the power of that alone, the way Corvo turned his face up to the ceiling, the way his ribs shook with it. It might have made Daud want to join in, if he wasn't here guarding a highly dangerous, annoyingly friendly prisoner.

“I probably owe you some info, too,” Daud said once Corvo had come back down. He didn't, really—Corvo may have brought them everything they needed to pin down Burrows, but it was a just recompense for the trouble he'd brought down on Daud, and in a secondary kind of way for all the crimes he and his sister had committed—but something in Daud felt unbalanced, and he thought offering this might help to right it.

Corvo leaned forward a little, eyes bright and curious.

“I asked the Empress about any sisters.” He found himself playing with his own hands, and stopped. Corvo's focus felt strange on him now. “Turns out there was this girl—a girl she used to play with, who lived in the Tower. The Emperor was close to her. Burrows was looking into it, but, well.” He frowned. The conversation he'd had with Jessamine only a few days ago seemed to stretch a decade back now. “Her name was Delil—”

“Delilah?!” Corvo burst in, an ecstatic expression on his face. “It was Delilah? The Empress remembered her? I have to tell—!”

It made no sound when he vanished.

Daud lunged forward and touched only thin air. He whirled in place, looking to the window, the door; nothing moved, nothing made a sound but his own sudden, ragged panting, surging in his chest, even as he waited five minutes, ten, for any kind of sign.

Corvo was gone.

Her brother slammed back into the real world on rough floorboards, stumbling to his knees, disoriented, and Beatrici grabbed him under his arm and hauled him up.

“I really don't like when you do that,” he complained, hanging on to her shoulder.

“Where's the contract, Corvo?” she hissed, and he flinched away. “I can't find it. Did you take it?” She shook him, rough, like a disobedient dog. “ _Where is it?_ ”

He ducked out of her hold but didn't go far, only enough to throw a look around the flat, a look like shock on his face. It was a mess; she had stormed through the files then every other cupboard looking for Burrows' letter, hoping she had misplaced it, hoping she was wrong, that this wasn't her brother's doing—

“You didn't have to tear the place apart,” he said, and it was the calm, the lack of surprise, that told her it was true. Betrayal curdled into a stone in her stomach; she was so heavy with it—dragged down, pinned. He had stolen the contract.

He turned to her and tried to smile. “I fixed it,” he said. “We don't have to worry about the Spymaster. We don't have to kill the Royal Protector. We'll be fine.”

“What did you do, Corvo.” She should have kept a better eye on him, she should have—

How had she not seen this? She thought she had been careful, she had tried not to listen to her own doubts, not when it came to him, how could Delilah have been _right_ — Her brother, her own _brother,_ the boy tied to her wrist, the one she'd grown up with—

He was stepping closer, hands out, and she smacked him away, drew herself up with her shoulders squared. “What did you do? Who did you tell, Corvo?”

If he told her, she could put it right.

He hesitated, and that was even more damning than the worry in his eyes. “They'll put him in Coldridge,” he said, and she felt the shape of the truth in the absence of an answer. “He'll have to hang for it, I think, but until then they won't let him talk to anyone, he won't be able to target us, we're safe—”

“ _Who did you tell,_ ” she snarled, even as she knew. Who else could do anything to the crown's Spymaster? “Was it the Royal Protector? Did you—” She stopped, a thought coming over her, overwhelmingly simple and destructive. “Did you plan it? When you attacked the Empress's carriage, was it so the Spymaster would target the Protector? So you had something to pin on him?” He was shaking his head but she ignored him, kept pushing, her heart in her throat. “How long have you been working with them? How much have you told them? Corvo please, tell me right now—”

“Nothing!” he protested, and winced, immediately guilty. “Maybe a little. But only just now, and I wasn't working with them—”

“How am I—” she started, and had to swallow, her voice horribly raw. “How am I meant to believe that, Corvo?”

It was a mess and it was her fault.

She was supposed to know him, she _did_ know him, all the little twisting faults and kindnesses that made him up. She had never thought things could get so completely out of hand. They were siblings, they were meant to work together, sometimes badly but always _together,_ she was supposed to keep him _safe—_

She had tried to. She had warned him, and reminded him, and begged him to wait and he hadn't listened, and Delilah had _known_ this would happen, Beatrici could feel it in everything the woman said and she _hated it—_

There had to be something she could do, some way to salvage this. She had to focus; if she focused she would find a way through, like she always had, to the other side of this disaster—but all she could think of was how long Corvo had been acting strangely, and what that meant about how well he knew the Empress and her bodyguard, how much he had hidden, and for months.

Beatrici had known it would hurt him when the Empress died—he had liked her from the start—but this, this was beyond laughing about tax reforms and collecting articles about new restrictions to the Abbey's influence—

And he was standing there, looking so serious and sorrowful and _disappointed,_ like she was the one who had crossed a line, like she had betrayed _him_.

“This is a good thing,” he said, shaping the words all careful, like that might make them more true. “That's what we always said. As few kill contracts as we can.”

Did he think she'd forgotten? This was no longer about trying to shrug off the dirt they had rubbed right into their souls, this was life and death and her brother had twisted himself into a shape that would run straight for the executioner's block. You couldn't trust the Tower; you couldn't trust an institution. Back in Karnaca the Duke had done nothing, and if they had used the Grand Guard for coin and protection the Guard had done the same in return. She barely trusted Delilah, but at least they were allied in their connection to the Void.

Beatrici clenched her teeth. If anything, she had to trust her brother: she had to believe that whatever he had done, he had done it for them—that even if he had betrayed her, even if he had betrayed himself, even if he had jumped head first into this mess she couldn't keep him from it had been for _them._ Maybe she could get him to see reason. She only had to explain.

“We would have had to kill him anyway,” she shot back, a bullet to his kid gloves, and he startled; balked, eyes wide, like she had hit him. “He's too close to the Empress, and the same goes for the Spymaster. They would have seen through it. They're too dangerous to keep around, we only had to keep out of Burrows' sights—”

“What are you talking about—”

“We had a plan, we were going to bring you in on it—”

“What plan? With who?!”

“With Delilah!” Beatrici said over him, knowing they were being too loud, knowing that at any moment their neighbors might bang up or down the stairs and interrupt, and she knew she would have no patience for it but it was hard enough controlling the quake in her ribs without keeping her voice down. “She'll take her place! I don't know how, an illusion, something like what you can do, but they'll all think she's the Empress as long as no one looks too close, and that means the Protector needs to die—”

Anguish broke across his face like a krust shell cracking. “But— But Delilah's her sister.”

They both fell silent. He looked at her, his whole face downturned, eyes like a lost kid's.

“She can't kill her sister,” he said, too quiet, and he was looking at her but he wasn't, his gaze piercing through like Beatrici was barely there. “She knows, she has to know, she told me she knew.” He shook himself and focused back in on her. “Delilah can't kill the Empress. She's controlling the Abbey, making sure they don't do whatever they want, and she's her _sister,_ it must be a—”

Beatrici couldn't bear to hear him say _it must be a misunderstanding_ like a naive little boy.

“She's not doing enough,” she snapped. “Delilah's a witch; when she comes to power, she'll destroy the Abbey and raze it to the ground like it deserves, and _then_ we'll be safe _._ Forever.”

Corvo stared like he was only just now seeing her.

“You're wrong,” he said, and Beatrici's heart jerked behind her ribs. “This is wrong.” His arms hung limp at his sides, hands half-curled, but even as she watched she saw the resolution build in his shoulders and eyes. “You never told me. Why didn't you tell me?”

She was realizing, like the slow roll of water as you sank underneath, that he would not be following her in this.

She had warned him and reminded him, but really, what had she expected to come of it? He was her brother but he wasn't a child, however much he sometimes looked like one so people might be kinder. Why had she thought he would obey? That wasn't what working together was, either. The thought unsettled her. She had wanted him to tuck away his doubts and follow her lead and now he was saying no, and if she even tried to keep him here, he would dig in his heels and cause every problem he could think of, just to gain a little time, and Delilah would see it and have him cut down.

That couldn't happen. She refused to let it happen.

Whatever kind of mess this was, there was still one way out of it. She would take it. She had to. There were no other options.

“Because you don't _think,_ ” Beatrici huffed, pulling all of her emotions in. “You would have gone off on some half-baked decision and gotten attached and everything would have been ruined.”

He didn't flinch this time, but she saw the hurt settle in him anyway, how his hands tightened into fists and he tucked his chin closer to his chest, not meeting her eyes. He was her brother; she knew him down to his bones, even the ways to strike him low.

“Well I went off and got attached anyway,” he said, lip curling back to bare his teeth.

There was a hollow inside her, singing with wind, where emotion had been. “Why didn't you trust me?”

Corvo, mulish, answered, “You didn't trust me.”

(She was realizing, too, that she had lied, and she could only see one solid reason why.)

He looked strong, standing there; solid in a way she had never taken the time to notice, having watched him grow up. She hoped she was making the right decision.

“Then go,” she said. “Get out. I can't work with you.”

This struck him worse than all the rest combined, almost a physical blow, but he took it and breathed in through his own pain, facing her. She didn't repeat herself; turned her back on him and went down the hall.

“Don't call me back again,” he called out to her. “I won't forgive you.”

Beatrici didn't answer. Eventually, the front door opened, and clicked shut.

She would find a way through. She had promised.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which corvo tries to ignore reality, and reality comes back and kicks him in the nuts. ouch
> 
> (i'll be honest, friends, this is mostly an excuse for more corvodaud)

The storm was still raging when he ran out into the street; it crashed through his hair, soaked him head to foot, trickled down his collar and into his boots. He was still reeling—still pretending it was the wet and cold making him shake in his layers.

By the time he reached the place where Daud's guard friends stayed, his sister's words had started to sink in.

There was something wrong with the world. It was either that, or something was wrong with his sister and Delilah, and how could that be? How could he have not noticed that there was something rotten there? He had followed Beatrici from as far back as his memory could go, through Karnaca, to Caulkenny and Dunwall; they had been inseparable even before the Outsider's Mark on Beatrici's hand had bound them together with magic—and Delilah was—

He slowed in the street, seeing the light in the garrison windows. An inkling of something was working its way through him, slow and sinuous, like a creeping vine.

(Delilah was—)

When Corvo pounded on the door it was the older guard with deep brown skin who opened, and his hand immediately shifted to the gun at his belt—but then the loud one, the youngest, was there, shouting, “What the fuck? You look like a drowned rat,” and a third guard, looking senior, pushed him back, telling him to go get a towel, and Corvo was hustled in to drip on the floor.

He asked for Daud. The guards shared the same look; or at least the two older men and the woman did, the loud one smirking like he thought he knew what was going on, and another girl, dark too, quiet, shooting them all baleful looks from where she lurked in a far corner of the room. They sent her to find Daud; watched him as he toweled his hair partly dry.

The night had burrowed deep enough inside him that, down in the hollow space it left, he found a decision he could make. If his sister still planned on attacking the Royal Protector, then Corvo would keep him safe; and if he kept him safe, then Daud would keep his Empress safe, and if his Empress was safe then Delilah couldn't take her place and everything would remain as it was.

He simply couldn't tell the Empress, or Daud, about any of it.

If he told them, they would go after Delilah and his sister, and they would kill them. It wasn't a fear, but a certainty: like the sun rising, like the arc of a knife, like how if you were cut you would bleed. Corvo touched the side of his neck, where Daud's fingers had pressed in; where he had let go when the Empress had gone. A threat to his own life was nothing, but the Empress was another matter. If Corvo told— If Daud knew, then they would die.

He could not lose so much of his world at once. Could hardly imagine it—didn't want to imagine it, was doing everything in his power to banish the thought of it away, far away, into the depths of him. He would simply have to keep the secret, and guard the Empress's Royal Protector with his life.

He hoped he'd be allowed to. He wasn't sure he could hide from everyone's eyes all day, if he wasn't. Maybe he could steal food from the kitchens, and learn to be very still and very quiet. There were always nooks and crannies where one could hide in noble houses.

(He hoped they wouldn't put him directly in Coldridge, with Burrows who knew how many cells away.)

Daud came in looking hassled, eyes focusing on him with a strange intensity. “How did you get out.”

“I told you my sister would call me back,” Corvo said, shrugging, trying to make a smile, but he couldn't get it to be anything but lopsided.

Daud frowned, jaw going tight like he had thought to speak and discarded the words; behind him the guards had lined themselves against the wall, except for the eldest, who had guided the girl and the loud one from the room. “The Empress didn't appreciate your disappearing act,” Daud finally said.

“It won't happen again,” Corvo said, the words more a curse than a promise in his mouth.

Daud's mouth twisted. “What, did your sister die in the hour and a half since we spoke?”

Corvo looked down; the bottom of his coat was still slowly dripping, adding to the puddle on the floor. Silence from the rest of the room, except for the guards shuffling briefly by the door.

Daud, voice blank, asked, “You didn't kill her, did you?” and Corvo glared up at him, but the pain was too sharp for his anger to be more than half-hearted.

“I told her not to do it again.” His hands had curled into fists, and he shoved them in his pockets. “And she threw me out.”

Daud looked him over, critical and assessing, and motioned for another towel and a change of clothes.

“So you came back here?” He sounded skeptical; Corvo supposed that was his right. “You could have run.”

“You would have tracked me,” Corvo said, flat.

“I would have tried,” Daud admitted, like when Corvo had said _maybe,_ but he knew that if Daud had tried he would have succeeded.

“I'm—” he started. “I didn't know where else to—” The guards had come back and they were all staring at him from over Daud's shoulder, wary or cold or suspicious. He didn't usually have such a large audience. The explanations withered on his tongue. “... Are you going to put me in Coldridge, then?” he asked, because if he was going to need a plan to infiltrate the Tower, he would rather know if he should start running now.

Daud didn't meet his eyes, but he had made it clear how little he trusted Corvo's promise; instead he was watching Corvo's feet, where the water was still pooling, though by now it had slowed to a drop only every so often.

“What are you here for,” he asked, deliberate and hard, “Corvo Attano?”

Corvo looked at him, his tense profile, and said, “For you.”

Behind Daud, the two guards seemed only to be shifting until the woman elbowed the older one hard, and Daud, who had gone still and drawn, turned to them with a scowl and jerked his head at the door. They left, leaving the new towel and clothes behind. Daud threw the first at him, and gestured to the second, turning his back to give Corvo his privacy. “Get dressed.”

The uniform they gave him was too short in the arms and legs, but then he was almost half a head taller than any of the guards he had seen in this room.

“The Empress has the last say,” Daud called over his shoulder as he was pulling on dry pants. “If you can convince her not to leave you in a cell, I won't oppose it.”

It was a chance, at least. Corvo wondered if he should feel grateful for it; wondered why he didn't, since if it worked he would have what he wanted. His fingertips were almost numb, and he fumbled the buttons of his shirt. It wasn't much warmer in here than outside.

“You recognized the name I gave you,” Daud added, not quite pointed, as Corvo twisted rainwater out of his soaked clothes. Corvo said nothing and draped them over the back of a chair. “Who's Delilah?” he pushed.

“No one.”

“Don't lie,” Daud retorted, sharp. “I learned where she came from, but you already knew she was related to the Empress. What else do you know?”

“Just...” Corvo heaved out a sigh, and finished closing the shirt. “She's a friend, and dangerous. I don't think she'd speak to your Empress even if you asked, so... it's better not to ask at all.” Better if they never met. He didn't want to find out what would happen if they did.

“She's everyone's Empress.” Daud had crossed his arms, but with him staring at the wall by the door Corvo couldn't see if he was truly angry.

He made a noise that was mostly agreement. “Yours to protect, though,” he said, and when he started looping the belt through his pants Daud turned, apparently judging he must be dressed enough for modesty's sake. He looked lost in thought. Corvo dropped the towel in the puddle he had left. “If she lets me stay...”

“Lets you stay?” Daud looked over at him, frowning.

“If you don't throw me in Coldridge.” He shuffled to a bench by the wall and sat down. “You can't just let me go. Where else am I going to stay?”

“You _want_ to stay here.”

Corvo said nothing. He had to; there was little question on that point. He supposed he wanted to, as well. At least Daud would be there, and however little Corvo knew him he felt marginally familiar, and Corvo needed him near if he wanted to keep him safe, and—and fine, it had been true, when he said he liked him. On the other side of the room, Daud snorted.

“Your sister really threw you out?” he asked. It was exactly what Corvo had told him, but it still hurt to hear.

“She did.”

“You want to elaborate?”

“Not really.” Even dry, he was still cold; felt stretched thin like a bubble of ooze, filmy and hanging on by the grace of a too-light breeze. His eyelids were as slow as the thoughts in his head.

“Fine,” Daud said. “If she lets you stay, you'll have either a guard or me on your tail, and you're not going to lie around and be useless. There'll be plenty for you to do once the investigation starts; before then, we'll see. I'll figure out accomodations.”

Corvo listened, and nodded, and failed to keep himself from hoping that if Daud was considering the logistics of it, if he was thinking of how to make this situation work, then maybe he might want him here a little, too.

*

The Empress had been less angry than Corvo had expected; mostly tired, he had thought to himself, but that seemed to be the night's theme. Had the Spymaster been arrested? Had he fought back, or tried to convince her she was mistaken? She had observed him over her folded hands for a full minute, Daud behind her shoulder looking either bored or pointedly disinterested. Corvo might have laughed, if his ribs hadn't been so heavy.

More than her watchful calm, he hadn't expected how hard it was to look her in the face. A few hours ago it had only been peculiarly familiar in that way he'd gotten used to, looking at— at Delilah. Now when he noticed the shape of her nose and the line of her jaw or the storm-blue of her eyes his blood got to thumping, distractingly present, in his throat, like his heart was trying to crawl up into his mouth. He tried to stare at the space between her eyebrows instead.

“Why would I leave you free?” she had asked. He'd been trying to look professional, and wondering what to do with his hands. Beatrici was usually the one who met clients when it was necessary.

“I can work,” he'd said. “Daud said I could help with the investigation; I could do contracts, too, find information, things like that. But, for now—” His eyes had flicked over to the man at her shoulder. “I should stay close. My sister's pretty pissed, I don't know that she won't...”

Her face hadn't moved, but something had shifted in the way she looked at him. He wasn't sure it was a good change. “You expect danger?”

Corvo had nodded, but Daud, curling his lip, had scoffed, less pride than earned confidence in the sound. “I can defend myself.”

“Not when you're sleeping,” Corvo had answered, and the Empress had folded a hand over her mouth as though in thought while Daud spun to glare at him.

“I told you I'd keep an eye on you in the day,” he'd growled, immediately defensive, “Not that you could sleep in my room.”

Corvo had only thought for a moment. “A chair outside your room, then?”

The Empress's hand had twitched; maybe it was a sign for Daud, who looked about to combust in outrage, because as soon as he saw it he clammed up and turned to face the wall, hands folded white-knuckled at his back and mouth a thin tight line.

“Guards regularly patrol those halls,” she had said, hand dropping back to her desk.

Corvo had shaken his head. “They wouldn't be a problem for her—but if I'm around, she might think twice, or not even try.” He wasn't counting on it, but he could always hope.

“You're serious.” Daud's eyes had narrowed, glancing over at him disbelieving.

“You haven't seen what she can do,” Corvo had answered, point-blank. “She's one half of the Ghost of Dunwall. Why wouldn't I be serious?”

“Perhaps you may also be useful by telling us what we might expect from her,” the Empress had said, and something in it must have meant she had come to a decision because Daud had turned to her, stared for a few seconds and thrown up his arms.

“Fine!” he'd said, then settled, composure returning. “Fine. _Outside_ my door.”

Once they had finished, Corvo had followed him out.

It was harder sleeping in a chair than he remembered it being back when he was twenty. Now Corvo woke up at least once a night, jolted out of sleep by a guard on patrol down the hall, or a near-fall as he slumped sideways, or sometimes just a feeling, a gripping certainty, that there was something waiting for him to drop off entirely.

In the day he followed the Royal Protector and his Empress where they went, standing outside doors during meetings with the rest of the Royal Guard. He had gotten his clothes back, and they shot him strange looks, wary, until about a week in they seemed to decide he would stay and went back to staring stoically across the hall.

Some days Daud spent entirely in his office, while in another room nearby the Empress was probaby doing the same, kept safe by her Royal Guard. Sometimes it was to process the results of the investigation, and Corvo helped sort through what seemed relevant, setting aside what pinged his sense of... _things_ happening out of sight, the underpinnings of a greater machine, for Daud to look over in more detail. Other times, it was Spymaster work.

The spies' tasks hadn't stopped just because their boss was behind bars, and some of the resulting workload—reports and intercepted letters, he'd guess—had been handed over for the Royal Protector to deal with. Those days Corvo spent standing or sitting in a corner somewhere, unobtrusive, fixating on every strange noise that rose up through the Tower.

Like today—though he had zoned out twice now, jerking back to consciousness with a frantic look around the room both times, like his sister might have hidden herself on top of the bookcase while he wasn't paying attention. The short nights were starting to wear on him. He had never been as resistant as Beatrici to lack of sleep, and when she had been marked it had only made it worse; this morning had felt less like waking than passing from one imprecise dream-state to another, slightly more detailed one.

Daud kept glancing over at him, frowning—he was usually frowning, but this one had a little something about the eyebrows, and he'd been worrying the corner of a page, creasing it into a dusty curl of paper.

“Attano,” he said, and when Corvo perked up Daud motioned him closer. “Come sit over here.”

He had switched to Corvo's last name since Burrows had been arrested. Maybe the distance made him more comfortable; maybe he meant it as a reminder of what he knew now, though Corvo couldn't see why that might be. He was almost always within reach, after all, and hadn't once tried to escape.

He carried his chair over and dropped back into it, then waited, patient, as Daud turned to face him. He had gray eyes, neutral, dark or pale depending on the light; right now the sun through the window colored them over in gold. Corvo had liked them before, but now he liked them also because they weren't blue at all, and only reminded him of the river.

Daud's jaw worked, like he was clenching his teeth.

“Try and persuade me again,” Daud said, something like a challenge in the set of his mouth.

Corvo blinked. “Persuade you to do what?” he asked, before the obvious (and Daud's speaking glare) hit him and his eyebrows rose up his forehead. “You want—right now?”

“Mh.” Daud shrugged. “No. You've been brooding for a week right where I can see you, so I mostly want to deck you in the face.”

Corvo tried not to pout. “I haven't been brooding.”

“Would you rather I said sulking?” Daud asked, dry, and Corvo huffed but allowed it. “I want to know how it feels when you use it, if I can recognize it. Consider it an experiment.”

“It won't work,” Corvo said, and nothing more. He had never gotten anyone to do something they wouldn't have wanted to do anyway, given the opportunity and some slightly loosened inhibitions. Daud's eyes flickered between his, measuring or looking for something.

“Do it anyway.”

“Alright,” Corvo said, leaned forward, and focused.

It was a little like how Beatrici had described using the Void to find the things she wanted: you let it in, let it fill the space behind and around and inside your eyes, cold and dry, the opposite of tears, and then you saw—her: a letter, a will, an extra can of pickled eel; and him, the threads people were made of. Then the part of him made of Void reached out and pulled.

This thread of Daud's was thin, hard to find and hard to grip, but Corvo had more than a decade of experience doing this and, even sleep-deprived, he pinched and caught it and tugged, watching Daud's expression.

The thread didn't move, as he had expected, and neither did Daud's face.

“Well?” Daud asked, seeing him looking.

Corvo shrugged. “I'm trying. I told you it wouldn't work.”

“Keep trying,” Daud ordered, scowling.

Corvo twirled the thread in his grip and yanked, once. Some part of him always expected people to react when he did it, like they might feel him touching this unknown, impossible part of them, like it might physically bring them forward, but nothing budged. The strain of using the Void was starting to build at the back of his head. He could feel his palms growing clammy.

“Push harder,” Daud growled, eyes fixed on him.

“It's more a—pulling thing,” he said, blinking the headache away.

“Then _pull harder._ ”

He took a deep breath, braced himself, and _hauled._

He had tried before, of course he had tried, you didn't find out you could pull the people around you into listening or giving up their secrets or being a little kinder and not try to grab everything you thought the world had kept from you, and every time he wondered whether it was the thread that would break first, or him.

It had never been the thread that broke first—but even as he threw himself blindly at the wall of exhaustion hurtling straight for him, saw it loom in the brutal aching spread over the back of his skull making every hair follicle hurt, Daud stood, hands on the arms of Corvo's and leaned into his face with a bare-toothed snarl—

“ _Persuade me—!_ ”

and running on pure instinct Corvo let go and grabbed another thread and this one came unspooling into his hands easy as anything, a flow, a river of intent and Daud's fingers closed on the chair arms hard enough to creak, his eyes suddenly blurred with tears.

“What—” he said, letting go to touch his own face where it had gone wet. Water slid down his cheeks and off his chin, continuous, dripping onto Corvo's shirt. “Why am I crying?”

“Sorry,” Corvo wheezed, dropping back against the chair, more woozy than trying to get away, “I'm sorry, I didn't— I changed focus, didn't, didn't want you to punch me—” One of Daud's hands was on his shoulder, patting, stroking partway down his arm like an awkward attempt at comfort even as he picked a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and wiped his face. The tears were still coming. He'd pulled pretty hard. “I, uh— I didn't mean to, uh, to make you cry.”

What thread had he pulled? He hadn't been thinking, had been barely aware of what he was doing, but whatever he had gone for it had been very effective.

“Huh.” Daud shoved the handkerchief untidily back in his pocket. “Didn't want to punch you anyway.” His voice was hoarse, but he didn't seem particularly upset apart from the tears trickling down. He got an arm under Corvo's and tugged him to his feet.

Corvo staggered, then steadied himself with a hand on the chair. “Why were you angry then?”

“It's a good intimidation tactic,” Daud said, moving forward and practically dragging him with, “Especially with new recruits. Come on, walk, I'm not carrying you.”

Corvo didn't bother asking where they were going; he concentrated on not tripping instead, the Void haze thick in his head, not even noticing his eyes had closed against the now too-bright light in the office until they opened and Daud was unlocking the discreet little door at the back of his office. Behind it was what could have been a large closet, except someone had moved a cot inside.

Daud made him sit, then pushed him until he was flat on his back, the pillow soft against his cheek.

“Those are some strange abilities you have,” Daud was saying, and Corvo made a vague noise of agreement. Before Daud could step too far away, he reached out a grappling hand and got a hold of the corner of Daud's jacket. Daud paused, waiting.

“You didn'—” he said, and felt himself frown. “How'd it... feel?”

“It tingled a little,” Daud said. “Sleep it off.”

Corvo rumbled something contrary and unintelligible, and the dark rolled over and submerged him.

He didn't know how much later it was when he woke, but outside the closet the light had turned to mellow evening colors. Daud was still there, looking entirely recovered, and so was the Empress.

Corvo shot Daud a glare, trying to communicate _that wasn't fair play_ in a look, and the corner of Daud's mouth gave a sardonic little twist like he was saying _all's fair, assassin,_ just like in the plays Corvo would sneak into when he still had the inclination and the time. He did, admittedly, feel better, if somewhat annoyed that his own powers had been used against him. (For his own benefit. He hardly knew whether to be pleased or offended.)

When he looked to the Empress she had an expression he couldn't read, though Daud seemed to know what it meant just fine: he saw it and immediately scowled. Still, she motioned Corvo to the third chair, and he sat down, waiting to hear what they had to say.

“Since you played such an important part in bringing my Spymaster's treachery to light, and helped in processing the results of the investigation,” the Empress said, “We thought you might want to know the full extent of it, now that we have thoroughly gone over his work.”

Corvo drew himself up, alert.

“The rats he had his agent Arsenyev bring in were carriers of plague. The Spymaster meant to... purge Dunwall of its lower class,” she said, dry, “Through disease,” and her mouth grew tight. “We caught on to its spread late, and it has already contaminated much of the northern districts.”

A plague—there had been a few books in what he'd had to look over, one of them dealing with diseases observed on the Pandyssian continent, and he remembered the mention of rats. A plague brought in on _purpose._ The Spymaster was something else.

“We're rounding up the last threads: finding the people directly involved, building a timeline,” Daud added.

“Catching the one who started off the plague should go some way to slowing the general unrest it will bring about.” The Empress looked out the window, contemplative. She cut a stark, dour figure in her black clothes. “The people will demand to see him hanged.”

Corvo wondered how much it had hurt her, to learn about Burrows' betrayal; then, briefly, how many people she had ordered killed in her time on the throne. That part of her rule had never really caught his attention, though he was sure it would have shown up in the papers—if any of them had been Overseers, he would have noticed, but then they usually dealt with their own.

“Knowing for certain where the disease came from should help those of the Academy to find a cure,” she said, “But things will necessarily get much worse before they get better,” and she turned to Corvo with a look he recognized.

She was going to offer him a job.

“The Spymaster may have had allies,” she said, “Whose influence cannot be seen directly. I will have need of your services before this crisis is through.”

He glanced at Daud, who remained blank.

“If you're aiming for a royal pardon,” Daud said, weighted, “I suggest you take the deal.”

Corvo turned back to the Empress. “Will I have to kill them?”

The look she gave him was cool, and calculating, but there was something like curiosity in how she resettled her hands in her lap. “You have before, haven't you? Or did your sister take care of that?”

He flinched—the question had taken him by surprise—and the Empress's eyes went a little wider, like he'd done something unexpected. “I can,” he clarified. “I'd rather not.”

It took a few seconds' pause for him to realize it was probably strange to be making demands of an Empress—but then he had demanded much more from Daud, with much less reason, though perhaps she wouldn't see it that way. It didn't matter all that much. Even if they did demand he kill for his pardon, he would take that deal in a heartbeat.

Even if his sister wasn't, he was tired of surviving; tired of living on an edge he'd never chosen to toe, an edge he couldn't even always see. _Sorry, Bea,_ he thought to himself, and tried to meet the Empress's too-familiar eyes evenly.

The Empress, strangely, smiled. “We'll see what we can do.”

*

There had been a deadline for Burrows' contract on the Royal Protector, and it had already passed a few days ago, unnoticed by anyone but him—but then he had realized, the closer it came, that he had no idea what the timeframe for Beatrici and Delilah's plan was. On nights he couldn't sleep, he spent the hours wishing he had waited long enough to find out.

Those nights were fewer, though, since the one Daud had dragged him through the door by the arm before he could settle in his chair, and dropped him on a narrow bed a servant must have dropped off while they were away. It was tucked in a corner, with a good view of the rest of the room.

“You'll sleep there now,” Daud had told him, and cut off any questions—not that he would argue, not about this—by heading straight into the bathroom and locking the door. Corvo had sat on the bed and touched the covers, fine and fresh and clean, entirely different from anything he'd known but those rare times he had paid for a night at the Golden Cat.

He had slept deep, and crashed up into waking only once when Daud turned over hard enough to make his bedframe creak, then dropped back into the dark as soon as his heartrate slowed down.

Things weren't always calm: sometimes the Mark flashed purple-dark on the bare back of his hand, meaning his sister was pulling on the Void, probably blinking across the Dunwall rooftops—they were isolated flashes, not the rapid-fire sequences of when she got to the climax of a job and had to do some quick maneuvering to finish up and escape. He tensed every time it happened, watching for more, but usually it would only come up a couple of times every five or ten minutes over an hour, and he would let himself relax.

The one time the rapid flashing had started while Daud was out of his sight, he had cloaked himself in the Void on instinct, run to the nearest exit (an open window) and made his way as fast as he could across the outside of the Tower to the window of the Empress's office, where he could look in on their meeting and make sure nothing was about to go wrong.

There was the Captain of the Royal Guard there, and the Royal Physician—definitely something to do with the plague—and every so often Daud would glance to the window, looking bored under the mask of his indifference, and his eyes would slide away from where Corvo was crouching, unseen, on the sill. After the fifth time, he frowned, straightening in his chair; the Empress must have shot him a glance, because he gave a faint shake of his head, but then he glared straight at the window, eyes wavering but furiously stubborn, until Corvo sidled sideways enough that he wasn't blocking the whole of the view.

After, Daud had nearly run out of the meeting, and caught Corvo just as he was climbing back in through the window.

“What, by the Outsider's fucking eyes, did you think you were doing?” he growled. “That is a _three-storey drop._ ”

Corvo stopped short, straddling the windowsill. He'd been expecting something more along the lines of getting chewed out for listening in on private meetings. “There's a moat, and I'm a fast swimmer,” he said. “I wouldn't have _died._ How did you even know I was there?”

“I've experienced firsthand what it's like when you do your disappearing trick,” Daud shot back, unfazed, like he wasn't the only one who had ever—and multiple times—seen through that particular power. “What happened? Why were you at the window?”

Corvo hesitated, gaze fleeing. “I— I got worried.”

Daud's eyes narrowed. “It's been weeks. You think she's still after me? _Can_ she speak to you in your head?”

“No,” he huffed, then, “I don't know. Whether she's still...” It had been a long time, and he would have expected her to make her move by now, but then what did his expectations mean anymore? He would never have expected her to tell him to leave, either.

Daud made some aborted motion, then settled on saying, “Hm. Next time, come in through the door,” and went, Corvo on his heels.

There were other times where the Mark flashed and buzzed, and nothing came of them either, leaving him wondering what his sister must be up to—what tasks Delilah had her doing around the city, what danger she was facing, alone, without him.

He still made sure, though, that Daud and the Empress were safe when it happened. Just in case.

*

The weather was starting to warm, the green bushes in the royal gardens growing multicolored flowers, and his Empress had decided it was the perfect time to take lunch out in the gazebo; they were just finishing, Jessamine picking raspberries out of a bowl with the tips of her fingers, Daud leaned into his hand, watching the long, high roof of the waterlock. Jessamine followed his gaze. The corners of her mouth were pink with juice.

“What is he doing?” she asked, and Daud snorted, free hand toying with his knife.

“Making a fool of himself,” he answered, eyes avid.

Corvo had somehow made his way to the highest part of the waterlock, and now he was turning cartwheels along the apex, rolling down either side of the slope and catching himself and running back up to do the same again like a raven in fresh snow. He took a couple of running leaps up the high columns at the front of the waterlock and waved, swaying, before dropping back to the crenellations and making his way freehand down the front facade.

Jessamine smiled, wide enough to show the tip of a tooth; Daud grunted and threw his boots up on the table.

“Savage,” she said, calmly fond.

“We finished lunch and there's no tablecloth,” he retorted, balancing on the back legs of his chair. Corvo's acrobatics were making him itch to move, too. Speaking of—he glanced back down, and Corvo had disappeared, either down in the hollow or sneaking around like a thief. He didn't make a habit of using his powers around them, but when he got in these moods it was always a good bet.

He didn't know what to make of his own tolerance for Corvo's... abilities. Perhaps the mess the plague was making of the city made him willing to ignore the dangers closer to home, if only to have one space he might call safe—but even when he prodded his own paranoia, told it that maybe the Ghost was only getting them to lower their guard by acting the clown, it barely stirred. The magic itself was a non-issue, after that.

Daud let his chair settle back on the ground. On the other side of the table, Jess was still picking at fruit, but it was half-hearted, her expression troubled.

“It bothers me, sometimes,” she said, “That we can enjoy a day like this when there are so many sick and dying in my city.”

Daud plucked up a berry and ate it, pointedly, when she looked up at him. “You're doing what you can. Making yourself miserable won't help.”

“There's always more an Empress can do.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Bring in doctors from the other Isles, if only they would agree to face the danger, or visit the sick, to show them I'm not afraid.”

“Not if you don't want to get sick yourself.”

She glanced over, eyes narrowed. “Those elixirs as stopgap measures seem to work well enough on those who can afford it.”

“Then find a way of increasing production,” he countered. “You don't have an heir—so don't risk it. You know everything will go straight to the Void if you die and the rest of the rats are left to fight over the scraps.”

“Maybe I should adopt,” she said, groaning, and he laughed, sharp and short, at the thought it could be that easy—though if anyone could make the court accept a child not of her blood, it was her.

She still received overtures, on occasion; courting requests, mostly, and sometimes interested looks and flirtatious suggestions from those bold enough to risk offense by taking the initiative, but the first she always turned down and the second she indulged more and more rarely over the years.

Daud had never tried to find out if it was the marriage or the having of children she objected to. She could have had anyone she wished, had she wanted—it was all the easier to remember on days like this where her hair dropped down her back in a lazy twist and her face lost some of its tight lines under the sun—so he could only conclude there must be something in it she _didn't_ want, and wonder, when the mood hit, what it might be. It was hardly his business to ask, however.

Sounds overhead, like footsteps on the gazebo roof; Daud reached for his sword as a precaution, but he had a good idea who was stalking around up there, and was immediately proven right as Corvo dropped from the edge to hang upside-down, grinning, his hair a long wind-tangled curtain.

“Hey,” he said, and when Daud tugged on his lapel to bring him down he flipped casually to his feet, his smile wrinkling his nose like a cat's, and Daud felt a warm surge waft up through him.

Well, shit. He really did still want the bastard.

Daud smacked him in passing as Corvo stole the last half-sandwich and a handful of raspberries from the table then wandered off again, aimless, to look at the display of spring flowers. Jessamine observed Daud with a thoughtful air, a hand over her mouth, but he knew she was smirking underneath. She read him far too easily these days.

“Should I reschedule with the Watch Captain?” she asked, teasing.

“Hm.” He shouldn't be surprised at how little it bothered him that she knew, he thought, getting to his feet. “Probably not.”

Corvo was squinting up at one of the garden's pale, leafless trees, assessing.

“Attano,” Daud called, and motioned for him to follow when he turned. “With me.”

They had already gone through the Tower's great doors when Corvo first thought to ask where they were going. Daud glanced back at him over his shoulder. There was no wariness in him, no holding back of anything: his eyes were dark and open and his face only curious. It had been a refreshing change from the crowds Daud frequented as the crown's Royal Protector, he had to admit: Corvo may have spent years hiding what he did for a living, but he had apparently never learned to conceal any part of his nature.

“You're going to try and persuade me again,” he said, guiding him down the corridor.

Corvo caught up with a couple of jogging steps. “More science?”

“Of a kind,” Daud answered, stopping in front of his bedroom door, and as Corvo looked from the door to him his expression morphed, sudden, into one of wicked delight.

“Did you like watching me?” he asked, impish, as Daud brought a chair to face the bed and maneuvered him into it, then sat in front of him on the edge of the mattress. He looked so terribly proud of himself.

“If you don't hurry up, I'll be back to wanting to deck you,” he warned. Corvo looked at him, head tilting in that very specific way, and Daud's memories shot him back to the alley in the dark, the cigarette, the mask. Somehow, it worked to ease him.

“I don't think you're remembering right,” Corvo said, leaning in, his hands pressing into the mattress either side of his legs. “Didn't you tell me you didn't want to in the first place?”

Daud glared, and Corvo's eyes creased with his grin.

“Okay, okay,” he said, leaning back in the chair, and focused.

Last time, Daud had felt no change in himself aside from a surface prickling at Corvo's strongest pull, but he had seen something like a shift in those black eyes, a movement somehow, as though they reached deeper down than they should. Now he felt the pull happening even as he saw it.

It felt... like an unfolding, a pocket somewhere in him being thumbed open. He frowned and shifted, probing his own senses, like he might reach inside himself too. His face was growing warm.

“Pull harder.”

Corvo eyed him, careful.

“You're sure?”

“Just do it,” he said, and then the first wave hit.

It was baking sunlight on a white-lit beach and him in the sand, sinking; it was damp skin and wet mouth anywhere it could reach. It was being unmade, his flesh lovingly eaten away until nothing was left but an aching, a wanting pit, like the pit of a fruit—whole and sweet and bitter and, and hard, fuck, he could feel that, somehow distant, somehow secondary to the sheer fulfillment of his own need.

“Oh,” he thought he said, dropping to his elbows, surfacing back into his body as his eyes closed.

“Are you okay?” Corvo asked, like he might have said it once already and been ignored. Daud blinked up at the ceiling, letting himself breathe through the heat in his own lungs. In every part of him. He hadn't imagined it would be so...

When he spoke he couldn't understand his own words, but Corvo laughed, low, and he almost felt it as a rhythm against his skin.

“... You have twenty minutes. Aren't you going to touch me?” Daud managed to rasp, and looked.

Corvo had pulled the chair closer, his knees bracketing Daud's, leaning forward far enough his hair was brushing the tops of his legs. He wondered what that might feel like if he was naked; how whole-body blinding, if Corvo lay his body on his, when a vibration was enough to raise goosebumps down his arms. It occurred to him that this was incredibly relaxing, and the only reason he wasn't lying back and falling asleep to the song of his own nerve endings was the warm body hovering at the edges of him.

“Yeah?” Corvo answered, almost a question, and climbed up to straddle his lap.

The weight anchored his hips, pressed him into the mattress; he braced himself on his hands and pushed up into Corvo's touch as it fell on his face. Palms broad, rough on his cheeks, callus catching on his scars and the prickling of a new beard. “You should shave,” Corvo murmured, curling fingers behind his ears to stroke the skin there, then running them through his hair.

“What? Is it—ah—hurting your delicate hands?” he rumbled, a shiver rocking through him when Corvo's fingers caught in a snarl and gently worked it apart. The pad of a finger pressed to his lips and he flicked his tongue against it, tasted salt and grit. The hands scraped down to cradle his jaw, his neck, and even as he pushed into them he said, “Wait.” His eyes had shut without him noticing; he opened them, found Corvo's black ones. “Do it again.”

He couldn't tell if it was stronger or kinder this time, when the subsuming heat took him, but he felt the weight of Corvo's body when he rolled his hips on instinct, then again, the pressure exactly what he wanted and exactly too much all at once. He forced himself still, gasping in a breath.

“I'm taking off your shirt,” Corvo said, having already opened his jacket—maybe he'd said something then, too, and Daud had been too deep in his own body to hear—and he pushed both his layers far enough off his shoulders to bare his chest, then touched him there too, index tracing a collarbone. “Can I kiss you?” he asked, soft, maybe even tender. Daud hummed, considering it. Considered it further. Gave a sharp, hungry jerk of his hips.

“Okay,” he said, and tasted Corvo's mouth for the second time, but the first time so fully, his tongue and his teeth and the wet flesh of him. Corvo's hands spread on his ribs, on his stomach, his nails thin curving lines of sensation all distinct and prickling like a sunburn, like a kiss bringing blood to the surface. Corvo pulled back and the air was a cold line on his damp lips.

Corvo's fingers slid up, catching on hair, to the dip of his sternum. “Your nipples are hard,” he said.

Daud pressed up into his hand, a tight little shiver zinging through him. He was sweating; he could feel it run down the back of his neck, and the thought that this all had been convinced from his body with little more than a lingering look pulled a low, hoarse sound from his chest.

“What—of it?” His hands and locked elbows ached from holding himself up. “Never seen a man's nipples get hard before?”

“I'm going to...” Corvo murmured, and he brushed one and Daud trembled and arched with a quiet cry, the muscles of his stomach quivering. Corvo leaned up and kissed him again, like he was trying to eat him from the inside out. “You're so sensitive,” he breathed into Daud's mouth, his voice shaking, and bent down to lick and bite at the other one.

Daud winced, shrinking back. “Not sure I like that.”

“Oh, okay,” Corvo said, backing off—“Just fingers then?”—and pressed in with his fingertips, cool on the bitten swell of it, slipping in his own spit.

“Mm.” Nice, but it was better before, when he could only just feel it and his whole body seemed to reach up for more—“Lighter—” and Corvo pulled back, trailed a finger across his nipple in a bare, dizzying touch—“Ah—!” and he was a bow, strung tight and bent back and unstrung, a weapon undone, sounds pressing up his throat begging to be made, and Corvo mouthed at him all heat and suggestion and flicked his tongue and it was wet and slick and perfect—

His pants were open, a spit-wet hand reaching down to touch and stroke; Corvo slid from his lap to the floor and Daud fell back to the mattress, hands fisting in the sheets, little grunts of effort working up his throat as he thrust up into Corvo's grip, then into his mouth, hot and sucking around him, and he fought back up onto an elbow just to see the way Corvo's lips curved red and shining around his cock.

Daud watched, jaw hanging open, panting breaths edging on a noise that was all satisfaction, and Corvo looked up at him, mouth full and eyes dark, and Daud didn't know if it was the pull or simply his body but his heart beat a heady rhythm behind his ribs, echoing, pulsing down to his toes and fingertips.

When Corvo pulled up, slurping, Daud let himself fall back again so he could shiver and sweat on the sheets in peace.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, bright despite the gravel from having a cock down his throat, “But do you have anything against fingering?”

Daud tried to hum and only managed an irate whine, letting his knees fall open in a pointed suggestion.

“Since I'm not sure you want to deal with a hard-on through your meeting, coming might be a good idea,” Corvo added.

Daud lifted a foot to the mattress in tacit agreement, dragged him in with a hand in his hair, and spent the last five minutes before having to be coherent luxuriating in the call and response of his body.

After, Corvo helped him put himself back together; buttoned his shirt and pressed a kiss to his mouth, only a little pressure, until Daud got it together enough to stand; then announced, “I'm going to go jerk off now. Good luck,” and went.

The Watch Captain raised an eyebrow at the state of his hair, and Jessamine kept her face clear in that distinct way she had of laughing without telling you, but he was so deeply relaxed he couldn't care less about any of it. Even the report of a confession from those guards in the northern districts who had been payed to keep quiet only got a pleased acknowledgement out of him.

*

Corvo saw her from the high rooftop of the Tower; behind him, Daud and the Empress were having tea in the sunlight with a few other influential aristocrats, discussing in low voices the next direction to take. It had been the most alien part of the process of court to take in, this one, with the false friendliness and the tiny food. The part he knew, the knives and treachery part, felt somehow more honest. More direct, at least.

(It looked to him like wanting someone stabbed made your intentions pretty clear, though when he had mentioned it to Daud the man had given him a look just to the left of pitying and told him that from him that might be the case, but any competent Dunwall sop could twist a stabbing into something else.

Corvo had said he'd trust him on that, since clearly he was an expert in noble dealings, and the returning glare and curled lip had been entertainment enough to soothe his ego.)

So he had been looking out over the crenellations, out to the rest of the city, the Tower District quiet and sprawling below him, and his whole body had stilled when he saw the shape in green on the balcony. He had been sure he would see his sister first. Delilah didn't give the impression she wanted to be on the front lines of a fight—but then maybe she hadn't come here to fight, maybe he'd been wrong, maybe she would speak to the Empress and settle whatever difference lay between them and he and Beatrici would no longer be on opposing sides of what he had increasingly been imagining would turn into a war.

He wasn't counting on it. A part of him still refused to think of the mess his old life had become—and what a thing, to think of it as his old life, like it was anywhere as distant as that made it sound—but he had had much opportunity to think of his options and what had led him here.

Corvo approached the nobles' gathering, ignoring how they hushed, and bent towards Daud who had taken his usual post standing right behind Jessamine's shoulder.

“You might want to go back inside,” he whispered; then, after a hesitation: “And lock the doors?”

Daud gave him a quick, searching look. “I'll keep an eye out.”

Corvo nodded. They had started sparring together at Daud's insistence, and Corvo had to admit he deserved his reputation as Royal Protector. If this was a distraction and Beatrici was coming, Daud had a reasonable chance of surviving.

He tried not to think too hard on what that might mean for his sister, though.

“I'm leaving the Tower for a bit,” Corvo told him. “I'll be back before evening.”

The Tower Gates opened for him—he was becoming a familiar face, and it had been a while since the guards last thought he might be a prisoner—and he stepped out into the street, eyes trained up, trying to find the balcony he had seen from the roof. It was a harder feat than it looked, but years of climbing walls and seeing cities from high and low had given him a good sense of the spaces he moved in.

It was empty when he saw it again, in a narrow street branching off from the main road—but the dark doorway below it wasn't.

She stepped out towards him. Delilah had dressed herself in vines and rose thorns, as though the plants were woven right through the fabric of her clothes; they wrapped around her throat and down her hands, twining, like coarse snakes. Her face was still the same though, narrow and wan. Her eyes still as gray-blue.

“Corvo,” she said, and her voice hit him in the same place as her quiet little smirk, just to the right of his heart. He hadn't thought how much it would hurt, seeing her again, knowing what she'd done, what she was planning to do. “You made Bea terribly angry.”

He flinched at the needling guilt, though really he should have expected the blow, coming from her—the thought gave him pause. He looked her in the eyes and frowned to himself, silent.

“Did you learn that here? At the Tower?” he asked, soft, and this time she was the one wrong-footed.

“What?” she said, just flat enough he knew it was real.

“How to make people do what you want without telling them first.”

It had taken Daud pointing out the back-and-forth between this and that aristocrat, explaining the layers of meaning and connection and influence in every off-hand comment, for Corvo to understand the tension in court that usually hung, unclear, out of reach. Even now he had a hard time following, using guesswork and instinct more than anything else.

A well-placed jab, reflexive emotion, action-reaction: it had always been like this with her. He wondered that he had been so blind to it before.

“I figured it out,” he said, and tried to smile, because a part of him still loved her, “Who your sister is. But I guess you know that.”

“Was it that much of a mystery?” she asked, her scorn prickling at him.

He braced himself against it. “Why didn't you tell us? Why didn't you tell _me_?”

“We're all allowed our family secrets,” Delilah shot back, edging on accusing, but the tension it referred to felt so old now that it barely touched him. Too much had changed, and the silence he and Beatrici kept about their beginnings was nothing compared to the gaping maw of everything Delilah had deliberately hidden. How much, in all that she had said and implied, had been true?

“Why do you want her dead?” he asked, and Delilah's sharp jaw tightened like this wasn't part of the game, like he wasn't allowed to cut straight through to the heart of the knot. “What happened? She says you disappeared.”

Delilah laughed, a sharp bark of a thing, thick enough to choke on. “Hah! She really hasn't changed.” She smiled at him, fixed and thin, vicious as bared teeth. “You don't know her like I did—and even if I gave you the sad, sordid tale, you would tell me it was an accident, that she was _young_. I've heard all the excuses before. I won't subject myself to them again.”

Silence fell over them both, and now, when they looked at each other, the space between them seemed as dangerous as the one between two swords. There was something lodged in his throat, something squirming.

“I don't— I don't think you lied about everything,” he said, and maybe he had meant it to be reassuring, but Delilah's lip curled back and she lifted her chin, looking down her nose with judgmental derision. “Did you?” he asked, doubt ambushing him, and immediately regretted it.

She let her mouth fall back into a smile, and it curved just like a thorn. “My feelings for you were the truth,” she said, soft as a petting hand, and it ate at him that he couldn't let himself entirely believe it.

The hours spent trailing along behind the Empress and her Royal Protector meant his mind had had plenty of time to wander, careless, back across the months and years: impressions of conversations, Delilah's shifting face, Beatrici and the growing empty space between them. None of it was anything he could have put his finger on and said, there is a lie—it was only a feeling that something was off, an underskin _knowing,_ like Sergei Arsenyev had been.

_She's just a friend,_ Corvo had told Daud when he'd asked, not much of a truth itself, but now he thought, a little more honest,  _Just a woman I thought I knew._ And his sister? Where had Delilah sent her to? The Mark hadn't flashed on the back of his hand in a while.

“How's Bea?” he asked.

Delilah shifted her weight. “She's been much more helpful than you have, lately,” she answered, snide, but even if Corvo couldn't read what had sparked in her eyes—had he ever been able to? He had thought so, once—he knew it had been there, knew she had hesitated before speaking.

“Something happened to her.” He took a step closer. “Is she hurt? What happened?” he demanded, and Delilah drew up her head with a curl to her smile anywhere between pleased and defiant.

“Perhaps you should ask the Empress,” she sneered. “I imagine she must know what happens with her own Royal Guard.”

His insides clenched in on themselves; had something gone down they hadn't told him about?

“You should have considered who your true friends were before changing sides,” Delilah added, cold, and a small part of him wondered: what sides? There had been the Watch, and the Abbey, and then his sister and him against them all—but the rest of him was a heavy curdle of guilt, and his eyes dropped to the cobblestones. She sighed, sounding softened. “I'll give you another chance. I know how strong your affections run, you couldn't help yourself—you were _misguided._ It happens to the best of us.”

He glanced back up at her and her eyes were ocean-blue, the gray just above the depths, her pupils a small black hook.

“You only have to do me a favor,” she said. There was a moment where her voice echoed like the bonecharms did, whispering in his ears, and in the next his mind was made calm, his heart settling, almost disconnected from the rest of him.

“A favor?” he asked. Delilah smiled. She was still so beautiful when she smiled.

“I only want a lock of the Empress's hair,” she told him. “If you bring me that, I and my sisters will welcome you with open arms.”

His heart tripped, once. “What— What do you want it for?”

“That's not something you need to know, sweet Corvo,” she said, soft. Beautiful, and so kind. He opened his mouth to say yes.

He did not—the hook was a pupil again, her eyes an unclear color in the building's shadow, and his teeth clicked together when his mouth closed. He didn't meet her gaze. Was that what it felt like when he pulled on people's threads? Had he wanted to give in? It had seemed so easy, for that long submerged second, such a simple decision to make.

Why had it stopped?

Delilah's lips pinched. “I should have expected you would betray me to the end,” she bit out, all ice now. “So be it. My half-sister and I have the same father, after all—I will use my own hair, and adjust the spells to compensate. It should work just as well.”

She reached up to him and he startled back—he had forgotten how close she was—but she grabbed his wrist, the tips of her nails digging in, and dragged him closer to cup his cheek.

“This was your last chance,” she sighed, disappointed, and he shoved the reflexive shame back hard enough that it bristled into anger instead, his shoulders tensing, his mouth only just kept from snarling, “But perhaps, when I take over, I'll keep you anyway.” Her smile reached her eyes, hollow and curled like a deep sea shell. “I do so love a pretty face.”

Corvo could feel himself shiver as she left. He wiped his clammy palms off on his pants and hurried back to the Tower, back up the great stone steps, through the front hall and the corridors and the winding stairs until he was on the roof again, struck and untouched by the sunlight and wind. Daud was there, off to one side, giving the Empress and her courtiers their space for what they probably thought was a delicate negotiation, and Corvo made straight for him.

Daud glanced over then frowned, reaching out as he came close to grip his shoulder. “What's wrong?”

“Did the Royal Guard catch my sister?” Corvo asked, staring him in the eyes, too off-kilter to use the threads and force him honest.

“Not that I've heard,” Daud said, steady.

“What about the City Watch? Did they find a, a Serkonan woman, my height, black hair down to—to here—”

“The whole city would know if they'd caught the Ghost,” Daud said, pushing him back to sit on the ground out of sight of the Empress's gathering and crouching beside him, “But I'll have it looked into if it worries you so much. What's this about?”

Corvo found he believed him.

The breath sank back into his lungs, and he pressed his hands against his face and breathed out, then in again. Relief buzzed in his fingertips. Corvo  _believed him._ For a moment he'd forgotten how simple it was, thinking someone truthful and worthy of trust, and the clarity of it opened the way to a new, crushing distress: this was what Delilah did. It was what she'd  _always_ done. Using their fears, turning them against each other.

Confirmation from the Watch would be a comfort, but he already knew there would be no sign of Beatrici in any of the city's cells. If something had happened, Delilah either didn't know or didn't want him to know.

Daud observed him with a critical air. “What did you see down there?”

“Just—a friend,” Corvo answered, voice still sticking, and Daud's eyes narrowed.

“A friend whose name I know?”

“She's gone,” Corvo said instead, “You won't find her. And if she makes trouble I can take her on.” Daud made a noncommital noise and rose to his feet—Corvo's hand snapped out and closed on his wrist. “—Wait. I had— I had a question.”

“Then ask,” Daud said, looking down. Corvo inspected his hand, broad and rough with callus, rather than meet his eye.

“When I pull— When I make you want to do something—”

“You don't _make_ me want to do anything,” Daud cut in, and Corvo did look up at him then, stopped short. Daud huffed, eyes looking off as though searching for words. “It clears the way. Doubts, hesitation, inhibition—that all gets... muted. Whatever emotion you reach for, that gets stronger. It's a dangerous, sneaky bastard power,” he added, dry, “But I'm still the one making the decisions.”

Corvo searched his face, his eyes; Daud waited, patient, wrist still caught. He'd reach the end of his patience soon.

Corvo's hand tightened, and he reached for the Void.

Daud frowned like he knew exactly what Corvo was doing, yet he stayed still, eyes locked on his, as Corvo reached for the thread he wanted and tugged, feeling it come free.

“I want your help with something,” Corvo said, too tired to sound anything but empty, and Daud's caught hand closed firm around his wrist.

“With what?”

Corvo breathed in, and out. “I need a lock of the Empress's hair.”

Daud raised an eyebrow. “What for?”

“You don't need to know,” Corvo told him, making it sound as cool and self-assured as Delilah had been; pulled harder on the thread, felt it unspool, nothing keeping it back. Daud looked at him like he was being difficult on purpose, or getting in his way.

“I do, actually,” he said. “If I want to help you, I have to know what I'm doing. Now explain.”

For the length of a heartbeat, Corvo considered finding another thread, the one that only wanted a task to be done, the one he knew existed somewhere deep in the tangle, and even if it wouldn't come into his hands he would pull and haul and drag until either he dropped or he yanked the thread out and left only a gaping, bloody hole, painful, raw, unexploitable—

He broke the connection, looked down to the flagstones.

“Maybe I'm just weak,” he said, and Daud shifted in his grip. “Maybe that's why she could—”

— _Why she could tug me around like a kite on a string._

Daud snorted. “Weak? Stubborn ass like you?” It was, weirdly enough, comforting to be so off-handedly insulted. “Was that what she wanted?”

“She wouldn't tell me why,” Corvo said, his hand tight around Daud's wrist. “I asked, but she made it—not matter. I don't know how.”

“We'll figure it out.” Daud pulled on his arm, drew him up to standing. “Make sure she can't do it again. Go rest, you look dead on your feet.”

“No.” He was fine. He would be fine. “I'll keep watch until your meeting's done.” He had to make sure Daud stayed alive, because then so would the Empress, and maybe, if he managed to convince himself, that would be enough.

*

On the morning of the third of the month of Songs, a package came for Corvo Attano. Inspection by the squad whose garrison it was left at revealed two paintings; there was also a note, sealed and addressed, that they decided not to open.

Corvo's sister had shown signs of life about two weeks ago, or so Corvo had told Daud, and he wondered whether this was her doing—or Delilah's, who for her part hadn't manifested again. The search for her had stopped; Corvo probably knew more than they would find out, and for the moment he wasn't willing to share. In any case, the plague held priority.

The paintings wound up in a corner of his office, hanging half-out of the tube they came in with. Curiosity made him unroll them for a look. One was a strange, twisting tree on a suspended island of rock; the other was of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin, fragmented by the light and crowned in pale fire, her eyes an inversion of themselves. Daud had seen Sokolov's works, subtle and detailed, often somber—but these, even riotous in color and less masterfully controlled, were something else. There was a depth to the space behind the tree, a sense that its branches reached further than the paint could show; and from Jessamine's eyes, there was an urgent, creeping certainty that something would come crawling out.

The paintings had returned to the tube, shoved up behind a bookshelf for now. He had not liked the way they looked back.

Corvo was quiet all day and well into the afternoon, until he disappeared while the sun was still high and slanting through Daud's office window. He may have, if one were to ask with enough irritating insistence, admitted to a little disappointment: the paperwork was boring, and more annoying than usual owing to how it should have gone to the Spymaster they still hadn't replaced, and Corvo was a decent enough distraction when Daud was in the mood.

Half an hour later, the door opened, nearly soundless, and closed on its own. Daud didn't need to look up to take a guess at who had just come in; he wouldn't have seen anything, anyway. Corvo seemed intent on being a distraction after all.

Daud appended his signature at the end of another update on the state of the Tyvian blockade, and a pair of bare arms slid under his, wrapping around his chest to pull him back in the chair. What felt like a nose tucked itself into his neck. Corvo's hair, fresh and smelling of soap, stuck damply to his cheek.

He had bathed, apparently. The soap smelled like Daud's.

Corvo's mouth opened on the pulse at his throat, tongue tasting skin, and when Daud pushed him briefly away he felt teeth instead, a wide curve of them, as Corvo grinned.

“Would you fuck me?” Corvo asked into his neck.

Daud grunted. “Can it wait until tonight?” He  _did_ have work to finish, even if he wouldn't mind putting it off until later. Corvo's arms flexed around him like he'd tried to press closer and forgotten the chair in the way; he growled, frustrated.

“Do you _want_ it to?” he asked, making it clear _he_ didn't. Daud snorted, unlocked the arms from around him and stood.

As soon as the chair was clear Corvo pushed it out of the way and boxed him in against the desk. He wasn't even dressed: a towel wrapped around his waist did the bare minimum for decency, and Daud could feel what was under it pressing into him. Was this why he'd stolen in here like a thief? Daud glared, caught between amusement and a low, rational panic at the thought that anyone might come in.

“Did you at least lock the door?” he gritted through his teeth, face warm. Corvo leaned in and Daud leaned back, eyes narrowed, but he still managed to peck a kiss on Daud's pinched lips by craning his neck like an idiot.

“Of course I did,” he said, “I'm not an idiot—” which, see previous point, was untrue, but Daud didn't dispute it since as soon as his mouth opened Corvo licked inside and swallowed whatever protest he might have made. He only backed off once Daud's lips were tender and the flush, going by how hot his face was, had reached his ears. “Please fuck me?” he added, rocking his hips into Daud's.

“If you get off me we might get to the cot—”

“No, I want you right here.” Another pointed thrust, and the towel threatened to give up its hold. “Do me on your desk like in the penny dreadfuls.”

“You read those things?” He steadied Corvo's hips and tucked the towel in tighter, then tugged him closer with it, snug enough that he could only give a futile little wriggle. “You'll have to get me hard first, in any case,” he rumbled, kissing him again.

“If I pull it out of you you'll go all boneless,” Corvo laughed into his mouth, thinking himself funny. Daud bit him.

“Then do it the old-fashioned way,” he retorted, and pushed him down.

Daud was still mostly soft when he undid his pants, but Corvo bent close anyway, licked a wet stripe up his length and mouthed the base, nose in the wiry hair, then worked his way back down to suck him in, soft tongue and careful teeth, the hot palms of his hands branding the top of Daud's thighs. Soon Daud was rolling into the pressure as he watched the long line of Corvo's back, rough sounds making their way up his throat, and Corvo slipped off and rose up his body, the towel sliding to the floor.

“Now?” he said, breathless, and Daud grabbed him by the backs of his thighs and turned him around, dropping him flat on the desk and he laughed, high and breathy, reaching for him.

“You have oil?” Daud asked, and spit into his hand, but even as Corvo stretched and answered he reached down and felt how slick he was, how loose, one then two fingers slipping in with no problem.

“Got myself open in the bath, just do me,” he gasped, squirming; Daud pulled him closer to the edge of the desk.

“If I need it later—”

“Second drawer on the left, the one you never use, Outsider's— _please,_ ” he begged, crossing his arms over his face but legs drawing Daud in, “I've been thinking of this, so much, forever, please—” then, as Daud lined himself up and pushed in, moaned, “ _Yes,_ ” arching into the first thrust.

He rolled his hips with Daud's rocking; groaned, “Harder,” as he grabbed onto the top edge of the desk to brace himself and push back; then he snarled it, heels digging into Daud's spine, and when Daud only pinned his hips down and ground in shallow, just to be contrary, he threw back his head and howled, “ _DAUD, HARDEMMFM—_ ”

“Shut _up,_ ” Daud growled, speeding up even as Corvo bit down on the fingers in his mouth, and he pulled them away to grab his hips and lay into him, the spit drying cold.

“Should have, done it when, huh, I f _fuh_ —first, told, _ah_ —told you—”

Incredible. The bastard just couldn't stop talking—

Daud resettled him and thrust in with savage stabs of his hips, adjusting until he found the angle that made Corvo lock his ankles together and clench his thighs, and then he took hold of his cock and stroked him through his drawn-out, full-throated keening—“Oh fuck oh  _fuck oh FUCK—_ ” until Corvo came all over himself with a jolt, Daud biting his lip and burying himself inside, eyelids fluttering as he rode out the clutching waves of Corvo's body.

He was laughing, out of breath but shaking a little with it, sprawled out and loose on Daud's desk. Daud lay himself down on him, pressed his mouth to the swell of a pectoral, not quite kissing, not quite doing anything in particular—just basking, turning his cheek into him, soaking in his heat through skin and shirt.

Corvo clenched around him with a curious noise, and he couldn't help pressing into it, a quiet rumble in his chest.

“You're still hard,” he said, not entirely questioning.

“It's fine,” Daud said on automatic, then, thinking: “Might not last.”

“You can come in me, I don't mind.” Immediate, like that was something he'd thought of, too.

Daud huffed; drew out a little and pushed in again, testing the slick of the oil, and Corvo tightened, his breath catching. “Meant I might not stay hard,” he clarified. It happened, sometimes; he had the sense that sex was more something fun, for him, than the necessity it seemed to be for others, and his body didn't always stay on board with his plans.

Corvo's hand got a grip on his ass and tugged him in. “Fuck me again while you are, then?”

The oil in the drawer was actually a tub of something clear and thick, like what Sokolov used for burns, and since he would rather not imagine the Royal Physician handing it over and undoubtedly having a good idea what it might be used for, he decided Corvo must have stolen it before hiding it in his desk.

He smeared some on his fingers and pressed it, careful, into Corvo, slipping in around the weight of his own cock. Corvo swallowed with an audible sound and canted up his hips.

He switched his grip to the bottom edge of the desk when Daud got to work, wincing and oversensitive at first, then started to shove himself into it, his throat bent back, on display, dick leaking on his own stomach and panting through his wide-open mouth, and as his gasps turned to high-pitched, breathy exclamations Daud swore and pulled out, then thrust three fingers in, curled them, and pressed his free hand down on his stomach to rub him to a second finish.

Corvo gritted his teeth and whined as Daud drew his fingers out—the rim of his hole was red and used, a little swollen, his ass slick with sweat and grease, and now the come pooled on his belly was streaked halfway up his chest—but when Daud moved to pull away his legs locked around him again, and he pushed up onto an elbow to look at him.

“You didn't come,” he said, edging on slurred, and his hips shifted as though he'd clenched down to check if he was right.

“Told you I might not,” Daud reminded him. Corvo dropped to the desk and arched, thighs splayed like he meant to be enticing, his heels digging bruises into Daud's back.

“Want you again,” he said, a bit breathy, a bit whining; Daud pushed down on the sharp bones of his hips to stop him moving.

“You sure about that?” he asked. “Looks like it might hurt.”

“Doesn't,” he said, which must have been enough of a lie that he immediately corrected it to, “A little. Please?” He pushed his hips up into Daud's grip, looking certain, sounding desperate, and Daud gave in.

He took Corvo's cock in hand and stroked him, light, until after a too-long time it had gone hard and curved again in his grip and Corvo's ribs were heaving, his hips jerking up, his knees squeezing Daud's sides with how tightly curled his body was. His hands scrabbled on the desk for purchase and, finding nothing, fisted in his own hair. “ _Please—_ ” His dick had gone dark and flushed, the foreskin pulled back from the wet head, but despite how he trembled and shook nothing came out of him and he keened, frenzied or frustrated or some other clutching, tearing, incomprehensible emotion. “Fingers— I need—”

Daud's free hand dug into his hip, hard enough it might bruise later; he tried to soften his grasp, scooped up more grease and pressed against his hole but stopped, tensing, when Corvo flinched—then Corvo was arching his back, the muscles of his stomach straining, like he might bring them inside him by sheer force of will.

“Give—” he moaned, hoarse, and as Daud's fingers sank in with no resistance the word turned to rough whining, Corvo's body clenching and releasing, spasmodic, his teeth gritted like he was fighting not to break.

He came dry the third time, then flopped back, strings cut, his breaths coming in short rasps.

“Again,” he demanded, thighs and calves shaking around Daud's hips, not even that one word managing to come out steady. Daud shoved his legs away with ease.

“You're drinking water first,” Daud snapped back, failing to keep the undercurrent of anger out. He stomped to the carafe the servants always left out for when he was too deep in work to remember to get his own, filled the cup sitting beside it, and stomped back, not meeting Corvo's eyes even as he wrestled him up into sitting. He wasn't sure what he'd find there if he did; wasn't sure he was ready for whatever it was, not just yet. Corvo settled at the edge of the desk with a sharp, aborted wince.

Daud folded Corvo's hands around the cup and held it pointedly near his face.

“I'm getting slick everywhere,” he complained, but drank when Daud's hand tightened on his knee.

“I'll make you clean the desk after,” Daud said, most of his mind still busy considering this—problem, he supposed, that he was faced with. He couldn't tell what Corvo was after, if it was the sex or the pain or something else entirely he wasn't finding, maybe something he didn't know himself, and most of all Daud couldn't tell why. Was it the paintings? Had he recognized them?

Why wasn't he _saying_ anything?

Corvo held out the glass. “Again.”

“Thirsty?” Daud asked, but before he could turn Corvo fisted a hand in the front of his shirt and dragged him close.

“Yes,” he said, ankles hooking in the backs of Daud's knees, “ _Again,_ ” and as soon as Daud saw the flickering thing in the depths of his eyes he grabbed Corvo by the throat and squeezed.

“ _Do not,_ ” he snarled, “ _use that against me._ ” Corvo's throat quavered under his hand, trying to swallow, trying to breathe, but all his hands could think to do was claw at his shirt, his arms, pull him in until he could feel the way Corvo's chest jerked to fight in air.

When Daud released him, his head dropped like a stone into the crook of Daud's shoulder, pushing at him as he struggled for breath.

“Sorry,” he choked, hands shaking and petting and desperately soft, “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have, I'm sorry,” and Daud wrapped his arms around him and held him close.

“Probably shouldn't have choked you either,” he muttered, digging fingers into Corvo's hair to scratch at his nape the way he liked. Corvo's next breath hissed like something hurt, then settled, his hands calming some. “Should I be worried?” Daud asked. Of course he should be—should have been a while ago, probably, though trying to figure out when he should have stopped rather than given in to Corvo's demands wouldn't do anything to help—but maybe if he asked rather than waited, Corvo would give him an answer to the question of why.

The silence stretched long enough he thought it might be a lost cause.

Then: “You know,” Corvo said, muffled in the fabric of Daud's shirt, “One time, Delilah rode my face and jerked me off until I cried.”

Daud grimaced. “What does that have to do with it?”

Corvo's arms tightened around him. Daud belatedly realized that Corvo was a mess right now, and he was getting that mess all over Daud's shirt. He hoped he had thought to keep a change of clothes in the closet room.

“She's dead,” Corvo croaked, “—Or as good as,” he added with a stiff snort of laughter, and the pieces fell in neat alignment, simple and clear. _You loved her,_ Daud didn't say, because if Corvo was like this then maybe he wasn't up to dealing with it so directly, and if that was the case then Daud didn't have to discuss his obviously tender feelings.

His fingers sank deeper in Corvo's hair, kneading. Jessamine would be sorry to hear the news, he imagined, but if it meant the woman wouldn't get another chance to do whatever she'd done last time Corvo had seen her, it seemed a net positive in his book. “Looks to me like you're rid of a dangerous problem,” he offered, then frowned, because it sounded a lot more callous than comforting now it was out of his mouth—but Corvo only huffed, then coughed in his shoulder, like he was clearing his throat.

“ _I'm_ a dangerous problem,” he retorted, sounding exhausted. It might have just been another very tired laugh, then.

“You still are,” Daud quipped back, tugging on his hair a little, and Corvo pressed up against him like he was in any way capable of another round.

His mouth wandered up to Daud's neck, damp. “One that gets your dick wet though.” It was possibly the most half-heartedly lecherous thing Daud had ever heard. He let the comment fall flat, let the silence unwind again, until the trembling was almost entirely gone from Corvo's hands, but apparently Corvo himself wasn't done and this was a thing he would chase like a bloodhound with a scent. “She told me she wanted to fuck me.” He sounded wistful, the bastard. “Never got to, though.”

Was that was this whole thing was about? Though he didn't let go of the lax shape in his arms, Daud bristled at the thought. He didn't appreciate being used to fulfill a dead woman's fantasies.

“Her loss,” Daud muttered, knowing the pain it would cause, and Corvo's fingers dug into his back.

“Are you always so cruel? She's dead.”

“I didn't kill her,” Daud answered, simple. “I owe her nothing. Who are you even trying to hurt?” _Me, or yourself?_ He didn't need to say it; it was clear to him now, even if Corvo was too deep in something like grief to see it. Delilah had been unkind to him—maybe worse—but even scum sometimes got stupid people with too much heart to love them, so why not her? He bent his head in to Corvo's, breathed in the smell of his own soap in dark hair, brought his free arm lower to curl around Corvo's hips. A new thought, easier to accept, started to unwind. “You said she made you cry,” he murmured, fingers spread out across Corvo's scalp. “Is that what you want? To cry?”

Corvo said nothing, but there was a tightness in him now, a livewire attention.

Daud's hand curled into a fist in his hair. “I can give you that.”

Then he pulled, hard, until Corvo's neck bent back in a lovely knotted line; Corvo cried out, breaths gone quick, but his hands had clenched in the back of Daud's shirt and he wasn't telling him to stop so Daud shoved in as close as he could between his legs, pulled him forward to ride the top of his thigh and Corvo ground into it, hips rocking. Daud pushed, and pulled until Corvo's voice broke, until he dragged Daud in to muffled a ragged shout against his shoulder and then Daud kept going, hiding in Corvo's neck, the things it was doing to his face leaving Daud troubled and unsteady, and when he stopped looking was when Corvo started to weep.

He clung even harder, his fingers like claws hooked in Daud's shoulder blades. One sob tore itself out of him, violent; then he went quiet, and there were only tears, dripping down Daud's collarbone, wetting his shirt. Daud let him go, gradual, to cradle the back of his head, and still Corvo cried and hung on.

“What if—” Corvo started, the words bursting out of him like another sob, “What if she never talks to me again?” Daud paused, wondering—did he mean Delilah? Could the dead talk to him now?—but then he said, incoherent: “Bea's gonna be—stuck here, and _alone,_ and—what if she _leaves_ —what am I going to _do_ —”

“First you're going to sleep,” Daud decided. Corvo was already slumped halfway over his shoulder; Daud maneuvered them both upright, and half-dragged, half-carried Corvo's limp, stumbling body to the closet. It took a little delicate balancing to get the door open without dropping Corvo or his pants, but he managed, and once inside he leaned Corvo up against the wall and struggled out of his own shirt, wadded it up into a ball and wiped the worst of the mess off the both of them. It was ruined, anyway; might as well finish the job.

Corvo wouldn't let go once Daud lay him down on the cot; he had to pry his hands off to get away, and even then Corvo made a mournful little noise and curled in on himself like he'd been abandoned.

The towel lay where it had dropped. Daud poured another glass of water, and dampened the towel with the rest, then took it all back to the closet room, leaving the glass on the floor by the head of the cot. Corvo seemed half-asleep already, only stirring when the wet towel touched him, wiping the sticky tracks from his face, then broad strokes over the rest of him, cleaning off what Daud could.

“Cold,” Corvo whined, baring his teeth, then stared up at the dark ceiling while Daud finished, another tear falling down his temple into his hair. Daud brushed the trail of it away in trying to be thorough, and Corvo turned his face into his hand, damp nose jammed uncomfortably against his palm. Daud huffed, but didn't pull away, unsure what to do other than let him find his own comfort.

“Don't involve me next time you want to self-destruct,” he said, harsher than he meant to be, and Corvo hunched into his own shoulders like that might help him hide. Daud grunted and pressed a rough thumb along the arc of his furrowed brow. “Which _means,_ ” he added, “Tell me you're hurting instead of making me hurt you.” He wasn't sure Corvo had meant to do it—it was hard to tell, when the man himself seemed at a loss—but maybe, if there was a next time, he'd think it over first.

Corvo's one visible eye glanced up at him, the corner crinkling; he was smiling, weak and wobbly but there.

“Gonna save me from myself? That's disgustingly romantic,” Corvo said, stupid and fond and exhausted, and Daud pulled away to cuff him upside the head.

“Who's romantic?” he retorted, gruff. “Five minutes ago you were weeping over your dead lover.” Corvo flinched, and though the hurt drained fast, overtaken by weariness, the stab of regret at the sight took Daud by surprise. “You'd be disgusting, too, if I hadn't already taken care of that,” he added, and thought Corvo's sharp little breath might be a laugh.

“That's disgusting _and,_ not disgustingly,” Corvo said.

Daud snorted. “Didn't take you for a pedant.” He made to get up, but Corvo immediately reached out; Daud relented and kneeled down by the cot, in easy reach of Corvo's grasping hands, and let his arm be held in a vise grip that left his fingers tingling.

“Doesn't mean I don't like it,” Corvo added, a little too fast, the beat of his heart visible in his throat. “Don't— Don't go.”

“I still have work to do,” Daud said, but didn't try to get up again. His free hand had covered Corvo's on his arm, rubbing the knuckles until his fingers loosened, warm and pliant. He wouldn't stop staring at him, though Daud knew sleep was waiting to take him, lurking at the edges of his black eyes. The more time he spent with Corvo, the more he thought this always seemed to be the case—like having the Void flow through him kept him closer to sleep than anyone else. Daud hesitated, then asked: “I know she threw you out, but... why do you think your sister wants to leave?”

Corvo's eyes closed like he had meant to wince and forgotten halfway through, exhaustion taking hold.

“I thought I could fix things,” he said, the words partly mumbled into the pillow. “But she'll leave, she'd rather leave the Mark behind than stay stuck to me.” He seemed already sunk most of the way into sleep, the transition always startling. “Don't ev'n... 'n blame 'er,” he added, miserable and low and muffled.

“Stop talking,” Daud told him, too soft and not caring—Corvo was there already, eyes closed, mouth trying to shape words and going slack, his hands the last to let go. Daud watched him, his lax and sleeping shape, and slipped away with the change of clothes from under the cot. He would deal with the desk; Corvo could make up for it some other way.

Daud put on the shirt and made the trip to his en-suite bathroom; Corvo's things had been carelessly thrown onto the nearest surface. When he picked them up, an envelope fell from a pocket.

The writing on it was unfamiliar, but it was addressed to Corvo, folded with cheap paper almost thin enough to see the letter through. It had probably come with the paintings. Daud looked down at it, considering, then picked it up too.

Later, once he had dropped Corvo's things off by the cot and was sitting at his newly-cleaned desk, he read the note.

“You're an idiot, Attano,” he said once Corvo woke, and Corvo rubbed the back of his neck in that stupid, sheepish way, and Daud got back to work.

*

In Karnaca, there were things that everyone knew—things like don't swim in the Grand Canal unless you're looking to drown, like keep an eye on your coin when crossing the western docks, like always hold out a hand to a black cat that stops in your path in case it's a visiting fae. Show respect to what you do not know.

Corvo's father had a friend with ties to strange parts of town, who gave him a charm made of whalebone on Corvo's third birthday and told him his gift to the boy was a long life for his father. When a year on, the friend gone under strange circumstances, Corvo's father only just survived an accident at the mill that killed three other men, he knew what he needed to do.

You ignore the Void's favor at your own peril.

The shrine grew at the back of their small apartment, rich cloth Corvo's mother had embroidered by hand and washed-up wood from damaged sailing ships, and on late nights where he couldn't sleep Corvo was sure he could hear it singing.

There were things everyone thought they knew about Serkonos, too: the sensual savagery of their dancing; the merchants and the whores; the black magic.

It should have been obvious what they were planning when Whitecliff sent its Warfare Overseers to the outpost in Karnaca. Emperor Euhorn Kaldwin was still new to the tasks thrust upon him, Gristol destabilized by political upheaval, and Serkonos was where the Abbey's foothold was weakest. Anyone watching their movements with a closer eye could have predicted the outcome.

A hundred died in the first wave. Every week, there were more broken doors and empty homes. Neighbors ratted each other out in the hopes of not being next, then cowered in distant parts of the city as the raids continued, herb witches and heretics and street magicians alike dragged out, summarily questioned then executed, if there was visible proof, or carted away to the outpost for interrogation.

Corvo's parents were caught in the second week.

Beatrici could hear her brother crying, small choked sobs he was trying to keep down but couldn't, wherever he had managed to hide. She had curled up in one of the kitchen cupboards, packed tight between saucepans and a stack of plates. Aside from Corvo, the rest of the house was quiet.

She had seen the broken plates, and the blood on the living room floor; it had looked nearly black, except on the edges, where the sunlight through the window turned it apple red and gold. Her father's panicked yelling had died out first, and when her mother had screamed it had been cut off, abrupt, with a sound like a fish being gutted.

It wasn't her fault, she told herself, crouched in the dark, and remembered how a month before she'd told Anna at school about the quiet little shrine in the back of the flat, and how the air around it always smelled of salt. It wasn't her fault. She hadn't meant to tell Jen the Outsider sometimes spoke to her in dreams, that he had whiskers and sharp teeth and bled all ink black, that had been a lie to scare him. It wasn't her fault. It wasn't her fault. It couldn't be.

Corvo's breathing grew quiet and quick, and she realized that there was another sound, that they weren't alone.

She crawled out of the cupboard just as her brother shrieked, high-pitched with pain, and grabbed the carving knife as she ran from where it had dropped to the kitchen floor, not watching for Overseers, only caring that her brother was hurt and afraid and there was something after him—

It was huge and covered in fur and its jaws were clamped around his leg, it had dragged him out from under the bed and halfway down the corridor, and Beatrici brought the carving knife down on its hind leg—

It yelped and twisted around and when the crushing bite missed her by inches she couldn't think of anything but hitting it and hitting it again and making it stop, making it squeal and stagger and making it _dead._

“Bea,” her brother cried, fat salt tears running down his face, and she looked down at the thing that had once been a hound. There was blood here, too, now, all over. The bottoms of her pants were slick with it. “Bea it hurts,” Corvo whined. She crouched next to him, silent.

The hound had bitten deep; Corvo was bleeding, too, clothes ripped, sock going damp with it. Beatrici didn't know what to do about this. They had never gotten more than scratched a little, playing careless on too-high garden walls.

She knew who to see about it, though. People her father had told her to avoid. People with scars much worse than this one. They would help him if she worked for them, and they wouldn't give her to the Overseers. They hated them too much. She tore off the dangling end of Corvo's ruined pants and wrapped it around the bite.

“Get up,” she told him, and he cried harder. “Get up, Corvo, come on.” He shook his head. She grabbed him by the back of his tunic and pulled up until he got to his feet, whimpering.

“It hurts!” he wailed, and she covered his mouth, but there was blood all over her hands and now it had left great brownish streaks on his face so she hugged him instead, crushing him to herself, trying to stop his screaming so the Overseers wouldn't return.

“You're coming with me, okay?” she said, and her voice shook but she ignored it, she had to. “I'm the big sister, I have to keep us safe. I'll keep us safe, Corvo. I'll keep you safe.” His tiny hands clenched in the back of her shirt. “I just need you to follow me. Like with the string? Please, Corvo. I know it hurts but you have to follow me.”

(Right after Corvo had first learned to walk, he had followed a cat while their father was turned and gotten hopelessly lost; after that, and until he was five, whenever they went out they had tied him to Bea's wrist with a solid bit of string. She had always been better at finding her way.)

Corvo nodded against her chest.

They went through the back window, down into the alley by the butcher's shop, then, Corvo limping and holding her hand, into the streets of Batista.

*

_Corvo._

_It's done. She's dead, or as good as. Her witches won't touch us._

_Don't cry too much over it. I'm sorry for a lot of things, but not for keeping us safe._

_Burned her painting of you last month, by the way. She was trying to use it—I felt the magic start and I burned the thing to ash. If there's anything I know now it's that it would've been bad._

_Keep the ones I sent you, if you want. They're probably useless without her._

_I still have business to deal with. Take care of yourself._

_\- B_


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which all is (mostly) resolved
> 
> (also i may add a kind of addendum fic to this, as part of a series, because i started imagining what daud promised in detail and just............... wow. corvo is whiny and demanding and has one kind of stamina and daud is absolutely ruthless and has an entirely different kind of stamina)

The space under the blankets was warm, stiflingly so, but Daud didn't care; he was too busy revelling in the thrum of his own blood, the thick hot weight of Corvo inside him, how his eyes pulled Daud's heart out of him like cutting open his ribcage and spreading his ribs apart. Their mouths brushed every time Daud rocked his hips, damp breaths shared.

Corvo pushed up off the bed, pushed into him, hands digging into his ass—Daud grunted and sat on him more firmly, then bit the end of his chin in warning. It might have been Corvo who woke him up this morning, the Fugue bells only just starting, by crawling into his bed and asking, “Want to ring in the new year?” but he was the one driving this carriage. He braced his forehead on Corvo's sweat-slick collarbone, his elbows on the mattress, and rolled his body back onto his cock again.

Their stomachs stuck damply together, mostly sweat, his own cock leaking precome between them. Without Corvo's pull burning him inside-out with want, needled sensation came back to the fore in sharp and overwhelming detail. He shivered and clamped down, just to feel the thick slide out of and back inside him, the answering alarm of his nerves—then jerked, clenching in earnest, when Corvo pushed a spit-wet finger against his rim.

Daud caught his hand and pinned it above his head; looked down into his face. He wasn't appreciating the interruptions.

“You aiming to get tied down?” he rumbled, his other hand pressing down high on Corvo's chest, near his throat. Corvo didn't still, his hips stubbornly working, until Daud reached down and took the base of his stiff cock in hand, kneeling up so the head barely pulled at him.

Corvo's tongue darted out, his eyes a little wild at the sight of himself only just breaching Daud's body, but he looked back up at Daud with a considering bite to his lip. “Will it get you to go faster?”

Daud gave him an indulgent, half-lidded look and climbed off him, reaching down from the edge of the bed for the clothes Corvo had haphazardly discarded; Corvo took the opportunity to grab his waist and roll on top of him, canting his hips against Daud's ass with a low, exaggerated moan, and Daud stabbed a vicious elbow in his side in retaliation then straddled his chest while he lay wheezing, a pointed growl making it clear he had better not move. This didn't stop him sticking his tongue out while Daud reached over his head and tied his hands to the headboard with his shirt, trying to lick the cock bobbing just above his face.

Daud moved back down, grabbing his jaw and biting his mouth, his tongue when it ventured far enough. “You're insatiable,” he huffed, throwing Corvo's head back to the mattress, and got to work on tying each foot separately to the other end of the bed.

“A man's gotta eat,” Corvo shot back behind him, wiggling his feet just to be a nuisance.

“You're insufferable, then.”

He was tugging on the ties almost before they were done, testing; if he pulled too hard, however, it'd be his own clothes he was ruining, so Daud imagined he would show a minimum of restraint.

“These are terrible knots,” Corvo griped, and Daud thought, _I rest my case._ He was being contrary, probably because now he was stretched out and helpless on the bed, a long sleek line of ropy muscle and skin—but he wasn't asking to be untied.

Daud stalked back up his body on all fours to cup his cheek in one hand and lick another kiss into his mouth. “You'll be a good boy and keep still, though,” he purred, playing along. “Won't you?”

Corvo opened up under him with a longing sound, doing what he could to press up against his body; Daud dug fingers into his hair and scratched at his neck and the back of his head until he stilled, breaths heavy, eyes closed. Knees either side of Corvo's hips, Daud took his cock, red and curved on his hip, shining with oil, and slowly dropped himself onto it. He shuddered when he settled, Corvo warm against his ass and thighs, hot and filling inside him; felt Corvo try to flex his hips and fail, feet barely able to find purchase in the sheets.

“Shit,” Corvo muttered, realizing the error in his strategy, with another futile little wiggle.

Daud gave a low, rattling groan, palming the struggling length of Corvo's chest until he got a grip on his outstretched arms. “Attano.”

“Mm?” Corvo hummed, focused on trying to find a way to move, making headway for now by rippling whole-bodied like an eel.

“ _Corvo,_ ” Daud said, insistent, and clenched, making him jerk to attention. “Look at me.”

Corvo stopped moving and obeyed, dark eyes knowing, maybe even hopeful. Daud felt the pull come over him, quiet and inexorable: the suffusing of his flesh, the naked desire, tugged out of his depths like a hand in his guts—but he only tilted his hips, just enough for the stretch and rough slide to spark in him, his jaw falling open around a shaking, satisfied noise. Corvo's eyes narrowed with focus and a little annoyance, unable to do anything but strain and arch his back, and heat hit Daud like a wall, like glorious sunlight, not a cresting but a consumption, and he curled up on Corvo's chest like he might fall asleep there, hands dropping to the heaving ribcage below him, his body contracting in waves. Not an orgasm—but so close, close enough to touch, close enough to breathe in and hold in his lungs, trembling and tight.

“Fuck—” Corvo panted under him, tensing in strange patterns, legs trying to pull together like that would get him the leverage he wanted. “Daud— Daud, let me come—”

Daud grunted, still trying to bask, and turned his head only enough to bite the peak of Corvo's nipple. He yelped with a jolt, jostling Daud enough to slide off an inch; gave a frustrated snarl when the ties refused to let him thrust back in.

“Daud, please let me come—”

“You can come whenever you like,” Daud retorted, entirely reasonably in his opinion, and arched to seat himself more fully.

“Then go FASTER!” Corvo burst out, really struggling now, moving like he was kicking his feet.

Daud glared up at Corvo's chin, which was all he could see of him from here. Were five Void-damned minutes too much to ask? He supposed he could have brought Corvo off first, but that would mean getting him hard again after, and he would probably have loudly complained anyway.

Still, he pushed himself heavily back to sitting—Corvo whimpered, pressing up with the little strength he could gather—and drew off, Corvo gasping and shaking at the slide then wailing, desperate, like this was an agony all of its own—“No no wait come back _please_ I'll be good I'll be quiet I swear—” then, sitting on his legs, curled a hand around Corvo's cock and stroked him at a punishing pace.

“Oh, _fu—!_ ” Corvo whined, and went abruptly silent, the muscles of his stomach jumping. His hands were fisted in the shirt tying him down, holding on like it was a lifeline; his legs shivered with tension; fluid beaded at his tip, then dripped down, slicking Daud's palm, the sounds of his stroking wet and rythmic.

Daud squeezed him, going still, and vindictively sank back down onto him.

“You're the worst,” Corvo wheezed, sweat shining on his forehead and upper lip, and choked on his words when Daud started to ride him at the most torturous, slow pace he could manage.

He made it drawn-out. He made it _leisurely._ He stroked himself a couple of times for the sadistic pleasure of it, Corvo keening and salivating as he watched, and bore down on him so he would feel the pressure but not the friction, hot and tight and slick and utterly still.

Corvo's eyes had gone suspiciously bright. “Please,” he begged, almost quiet, “I need to come.”

Daud met them, implacable, and gave a slow, grinding roll of his hips.

“Please!” He threw his head back against the mattress, back arching. “Daud please I _need to—_ ”

Daud flattened him by the base of his neck, careful but merciless, and drew up just enough to kiss the plea from his open mouth.

“Next time,” he murmured, and Corvo was barely following the motions of his lips, panting and licking frantically at his teeth instead, “I'm going to be fucking you, and it will last hours, and you'll be very, very patient. Alright?”

“Yes, yes, yes, Daud, please—”

Daud settled himself, and rode him ruthlessly into the bed, chasing his own peak. When Corvo's ecstatic shouting grew to a high pitch Daud reached behind himself and closed his fingers viciously tight around the base of his cock, keeping him hard and straining, and Corvo _howled_ and cursed him in every language he had apparently learned, which was three, and Daud came laughing, his whole body lighting up, supremely complete.

“Untie me,” Corvo demanded, frantic, hauling on the clothes as hard as he dared. “Untie me _right now—_ ”

As soon as Daud had undone the knots Corvo was on him: bowling him over onto his stomach and shoving him down, grabbing his hip, lining up and pushing inside with a hoarse, desperate cry; Daud found the headboard and held on, bracing not to be thrust headfirst into it, and the whole structure banged raucously against the wall to the beat Corvo's savage reaming of his body.

Daud panted through it, face in the sheets; through the brutal stab of Corvo's hips punching the air out of him, through the rough, stuttering end, until Corvo finally slumped over his back and stopped, still entrenched in him, gasping for breath into the dip of Daud's spine. Something wet trickled down the back of his thigh, and he grimaced.

He was going to be _very_ sore.

Daud hadn't so much as crawled out from under him, however, that Corvo's arms tightened around his waist in warning. He felt more than heard the low groan that followed.

“Please don't move,” Corvo said, pitiful. “My dick hurts.”

“I'm not staying here with my ass in the air,” Daud shot back—but somehow they managed to lower themselves to their sides, curled into each other, and even with the sweat and the come on Corvo's stomach drying against his back, it wasn't so bad.

Eventually, the sharp, sticky feeling of his cock moving inside Daud's body faded back into warmth and tripping heartbeat. Daud was still slick; Corvo could feel it against the front of his thighs, on the hardening length of his cock. He experimentally pressed deeper, arms pulling Daud's loose body against him, and shivered, burying his nose in the dark, unkempt hair at his nape.

Daud grunted, but didn't move. Had he fallen asleep? Corvo drew out and rocked back inside, mouthing at the blocky shape of his shoulder, and this time Daud pushed him off, growling, until he let go and lay back on the blankets.

“Thought I made it clear what you were in for,” he rasped, sitting up at the edge of the bed.

“It was worth a shot,” Corvo shrugged, and stretched, getting the kinks out of his shoulders and hips. Daud snorted, then got up and headed for the bathroom.

“Get us something to eat,” he threw over his shoulder, then paused, thoughtful. “Don't prepare yourself,” he added. “I want the privilege.” There was an evil little light in his eyes when he said it. The bathroom door closed behind him.

Corvo groaned—either he was going to come out of this Fugue unable to walk for a week, or that _and_ spoiled for sex _forever_ —but he got to his feet, grabbed his discarded shirt to wipe off the mess on his front, and stepped back into his pants for the trip downstairs. Whatever time of the year it might be, it was never the time to bother the kitchen staff.

There were always a few volunteers to run things over Fugue—pay was triple, apparently—and he was only just starting to imagine what brunch would look like when he opened the door to the hall and found himself staring point blank into a face he might almost have recognized in a mirror.

“Hey Corvo,” Beatrici said. One of her eyebrows was up, mocking. Teasing? “Did you have fun?”

It took a second for the words to sink in; then he imagined he must have gone beet purple, because his face was burning and he wanted to dig a very small, very deep hole, crawl in it, and die.

 _Then_ he remembered the many, many unfortunate times his sister had walked in on him being acrobatic with other people and told his heart to calm down.

“H-Hi,” he said. His grip on the doorknob was white-knuckled and painful. He was mostly certain he hadn't blinked yet. Beatrici waited, patient, for him to get a hold of himself.

She looked tired—leaning against the jamb, the skin under her eyes still dark—but less worn down somehow, like there was a weight she'd shrugged off since he last saw her. No new injuries that he could see, so maybe whatever she'd been doing these past months hadn't been as bad as all that. Aside from— Aside from killing—

Well. He'd get around to thinking of that again sometime.

“What're you doing here?” he asked. There wasn't much he could think of except that, so encompassing the question was.

She watched him back, making her own catalogue of differences and hurts, though some of what she was trying to hide behind the flat line of her mouth was probably amusement at the state he was in.

“I thought Fugue probably meant I wouldn't get shot on sight by the guards,” she answered, honest. Something in him was glad he could still tell that she was, but the rest was too muddled, too out of sorts to appreciate it. “I told them I'm your sister. They believed me.” She smirked; it would be hard not to believe it. She thrust a thumb behind her. “Told them I wasn't here for trouble, too, but some of them followed me to make sure.”

Corvo craned his neck to find Escobar and Lurk hovering at the end of the hall; Escobar waved. Corvo huffed and waved back, and they retreated, apparently satisfied Beatrici wasn't a danger.

Still, he didn't know what else to ask—or what to say, or how to say it, how to say any of the things tangling themselves together in his chest, a rat's nest of squirming. He looked at her, feeling his own jaw tense and relax, foreign emotions passing over his face, things he didn't even know how to recognize. A small, terrible furrow appeared in her brow.

“I told them the truth,” she said, picking her words, and though there was a new stiffness in her shoulders he didn't think it was anger. “I'm not here because of work, if that's what you're wondering.”

“No, it's—” He didn't want her thinking he didn't trust her—but he hadn't, for a time, hadn't he? He had even told her so to her face, unambiguous, a gauntlet thrown down that neither of them had wanted to take back enough to pick it up. “Why— Why not before? They would have let you in. They know me.”

For a moment, he was sure he saw her gearing up for something, breathing in, setting her face in that old defensive habit from years of dealing with predators and cheats—but then it let go, and she must have decided not to mention it, because she only said, “I told you, I had business to deal with,” a little weak. “Jobs to finish. Our backlog's empty now.” She crossed her arms and met his eye. “I imagined your new patrons wouldn't like the kind of business we were running.” She glanced around, at the tapestries and hangings, the carvings in the walls.

There was something in there that she wasn't saying, an implication, a line, a hook, but at his fixed stare her expression turned confused.

“They hired you, right? You're not... a prisoner,” she said, eyeing his bare chest with an edge of worry in her voice, and he wanted to laugh because really, neither of those options were right, but you could have made a case for either one—

The Empress and the Royal Protector hadn't exactly hired him, hadn't had him sign a contract, but they hadn't pardoned him either. They could, he supposed, chase him down if he decided that escape was something he wanted; but he didn't, and so the point was moot.

They _had_ started giving him work, following targets and reporting on their actions, stealing into nobles' homes to riffle through their secrets, giving him a little more each week, _trusting_ him with more. He was fed and sheltered and welcome, in the heart of the Empire, surrounded by guards, and it was, strangely, the safest he'd ever felt away from his sister's side.

“Sort of,” he decided to say, which was close enough to the truth without getting into the details, and gaped at her a little more. “I thought you were going to leave.”

Something changed in her face. It wasn't a cracking, or a crashing down of defense—but something changed, subtle, and instead of careful now Bea looked bizarrely sad in that weary, hollowed-out way he'd come to know so well in himself.

“... Correct me if I'm wrong,” she said, sounding raw though her eyes weren't red, “But Delilah really fucked us up, didn't she.”

Corvo flinched back from her name; couldn't help it, and looked down.

“We would have fucked up anyway,” he told the floorboards. If there hadn't been something there to exploit, Delilah never would have gotten in.

“Probably,” Bea admitted, but her tone made it sound less like a concession than a counter-argument. “We do have some shit to work through.” She hesitated, then, and her next words were cautious, like she expected them to hurt but didn't want them to. “I know you liked her, but she got between us like nothing else did. I'm glad she's gone.”

“You killed her,” Corvo said, and saying it was almost less painful than thinking it had been for the past month.

Bea shrugged, thumbs hooked in her pockets, trying to look at ease. “Sort of. She's in the Void, and she can't reach us from there.” Another pause, considering. “I don't think it hurt. She sounded more angry than anything else, when the spell took her.”

“Could you have—” he started, and stopped abruptly when he glanced up at the look on Beatrici's face: knowing and wounded, a little, but more like hitting a sore spot than striking her true. Her mouth twisted a little, crooked and dry.

“Maybe I could have let her live,” she said, “If I cut off her Marked hand, so she couldn't finish the spell, but... a woman like that stops at nothing, and we'd have betrayed her. She would've done anything in her power to see us dead. Between losing you and losing her, the choice was pretty clear to me.”

Corvo breathed in; swallowed. “I loved her.” He straightened, looking at Bea, at his sister, her open face. “Do you think she loved us?” he asked, and his sister said,

“No,” immediate, absolute, no space in her answer for anything but utmost certainty. “No. She wanted us, sure—for the Mark, the power. Maybe for your pretty face,” she said, her mouth quirking and falling flat again. “But loved us?”

He reached up to his neck and scratched, shoulders hitching up, and her hand closed on his upper arm, warm and small, steadying.

“You're my brother, Corvo,” she said, and shook him. “ _I_ love you.”

He didn't want to cry. He didn't think he was going to but he didn't want to, so he pressed his fingers into the corners of his eyes until it hurt. Beatrici pulled his hand away and held it, awkward, between hers, like she'd forgotten how to.

“I want to stick around until we both remember that,” she added. “If your... employers let me.”

“That would be great,” he said, fighting to make his voice steady, and she snorted and slapped his arm, light. He smiled, his mouth feeling crooked. “Maybe I can convince them. If I ask very nicely.”

Beatrici grimaced on cue and his lungs wanted to laugh, but mostly his chest felt alive, whole and full, like he had gotten a missing piece of it back.

Behind him, the bathroom door opened; he turned to see Daud walk out stark naked, towel in hand, only for him to slow to a full stop in the middle of the carpet and stare, dead-eyed. He surreptitiously moved the towel to hang in front of his crotch.

Corvo opened his mouth and apparently so did Beatrici, because she said, “I've seen worse,” and immediately after Corvo said, “She's seen better,” and they looked at each other, both smirking, and by the tone of Daud's grunt of disgust he had just rolled his eyes.

“I see the family resemblance,” he said; then, with an aborted motion of his towel, “If you don't mind?”

Bea nodded; to Corvo, she said, “Talk to you later?” then turned down the hall.

Corvo glanced over. Daud was observing him with a suspicious, critical glare. He didn't look surprised at all, but Daud couldn't have been expecting his sister to show up. Could he? Not right at this moment, anyway.

“I'm guessing you didn't get the chance to go down to the kitchens,” he said, too soft to cut, and Corvo belatedly realized the glare was more assessing than critical—like the time after he had met Delilah outside the Tower, or later, that other time, only pieces of which he actually wanted to remember.

“Oh shit,” Corvo said, because it said as much as _no I didn't, sorry, I'll go and do that now_ with much fewer words, and also meant he could leave whatever questions lay behind that look in suspense for the moment, and stuck his head back out the door.

Beatrici, using either a sixth sense or a strange new power offered by the Void, called, “I'm not doing your chores for you, little brother,” from somewhere beyond the turning in the hall.

He sighed and set off for the kitchen—resigned, hands in his pockets, and unspeakably, overwhelmingly glad.

*

In the nebulous hours between waking and dawn, Jessamine sometimes wondered what paths they might have found themselves walking had a known criminal not given them warning.

She did not like to see herself as naive, but she supposed she must have been, to look at maliciousness and call it incompetence. She was lucky that Daud had such sharp eyes; lucky, that Corvo's trust ran fast and deep. From what Daud had told her of their first encounters it was a wonder anything had had a chance to grow, but it seemed to be a part of Corvo's contradictory nature to want connection and see the potential for it, despite how skittish and clueless he looked, and for that Jessamine would send thanks to whatever remained of her ancestors' spirits.

She thought he might even have begun to trust her, in slow though tangible increments: he was more at ease when she was there, and would invade Daud's space, smile in that way that made her Protector's ears go pink, rather than stand stiff and nervous a distance to the side. Her late half-sister may have had a hand in his reluctance, though the thought left a bitter aftertaste in her mouth.

Delilah. She remembered little: keen blue eyes, short hair, fear and anger and pride, though there had been moments of kindness, too. What had Delilah looked like, grown? Anton had seen the paintings, recognized his old apprentice's style, and offered her a few small sketches—but even in those she had barely been more than adolescent, still so young.

Jessamine had kept the tree; the other had been burned on Daud's counsel. She had taken one look at it and agreed.

(Beatrici had told her everything—or as much, Jessamine supposed, as she thought important. Her Royal Protector had been there for the interview; Beatrici had sat on the other side of the desk, expressionless and watchful, and told them with neither doubt nor trepidation that she was there not to confess to her crimes, but to join her brother in whatever he may be doing for them, and that she had sent the paintings ahead as a show of her skill and willingness.

Jessamine had glanced to Daud, and he had been looking back. Neither of them had known yet what the paintings meant.

Beatrici had shown nothing. “I see,” she'd said. It was only due to years of experience in reading the smallest of tells that Jessamine saw a change in her face and posture and knew that she hadn't expected this, for Corvo to tell them nothing, but wasn't entirely surprised. “He probably thought he was protecting you.” From herself, was implied, but once they learned the extent of her story, Jessamine could only conclude that she had also meant Delilah.

There were many stories about the Outsider, and the Void, and the heretics and witches who sought to harness their power; still, Jessamine had never imagined that one of them could learn to steal a person's body by painting their face. Cold had washed over her at the mention of the spell's components—a square of cloth cut from one of her underdresses for canvas, a lock of her half-sister's hair for the tip of the brush, her _father's bones_ —but Jessamine had only asked if there was anything left of the remains stolen from the mausoleum, and Beatrici had looked at her with the most carefully unapologetic, unpitying look she had ever seen, and said she had burned the brush, and did not know what Delilah might have done with the rest. Perhaps it was the truth. Perhaps it was better for Jessamine not to know.

“My brother didn't know how she would get to you,” Beatrici had said, “Only that she wanted you dead. It'll hurt him to know he couldn't have done anything, but I won't ask that you not tell him. I hid too much from him already.”

“And the witch?” Daud had asked.

“She's gone.”

“Gone where?”

“To the Void,” Beatrici had answered, and they had known not to ask any further.

To think—Delilah, most probably thrown out over some children's spat, vanished before Jessamine had even known to call her sister, and a bare few months after remembering her, after learning she even existed, she was dead and an attempted usurper. Lost, before Jessamine had the slightest chance of... meeting her, knowing her.

The disappointment was heavy in her chest, the grief as shallow as her hopes had been new; but there was a part of her relieved, somehow, uncomfortably so, that her past would remain her past, and there was only the way forward now.)

That memory and many others kept her company in the diminishing dark. Sometimes, she thought of Hiram instead, still mouldering in the depths of Coldridge; wondered if anyone had told him his sentence would end earlier than expected, the wait and his neck cut short in two weeks' time. It brought her no satisfaction—even remembering that she had known him so long, and he had betrayed her.

At least this night had been mostly restful, despite anxious dreams about holding back torrents of black water with only her hands: she had woken with the sun. Yesterday's news was still fresh in her mind. Anton, notoriously difficult to negotiate with and opinionated about the intellectual worth of the academics under his purview, had, after repeated remonstrating and some promises made regarding future funding for his personal laboratory (under supervision, which he had reviled but accepted), finally agreed to work with his erstwhile colleague Piero Joplin. They would create a combined version of their formulas together while the doctors and the Watch continued to stabilize the spread of the plague.

However minor a victory it was, it left her buoyant as she dressed—especially considering what they had planned for the afternoon.

“It's not a good idea,” Daud said later, not for the first time, looking down at the basket on his arm like it might hold snakes rather than lunch.

“I wanted to have fun, not to be reasonable,” Jessamine retorted, adjusting the jacket on her shoulders. It was one of Daud's: much too wide, and strangely loose around her arms compared to what she usually wore, but stiff enough not to look entirely frumpy. She hoped that with this and her hair out of its tight twist, falling free down her back, she would look less recognizable.

“You might like going out unprotected, but I don't have to,” he said, a stubborn jut to his jaw.

“I thought the Royal Guard were a dim-witted, unresponsive crowd of shitheels only good for chum?”

“No, that's the City Watch.” He peered inside the basket, then hastily closed it again, glaring at Jessamine's bedroom door. “The Royal Guard are self-obsessed milkbloods with more concern for the shine of their armor than the skill of their weapon arm.” A pause, then: “Except for Thomas. He makes a good effort.”

There were always exceptions, she knew; he would never think to say the same things of the Watch garrison he had worked with as he did of the whole of the city's police force.

Jessamine hummed, smiling as she inspected herself in the mirror. It would do.

“I'm hardly unprotected, Daud,” she said, turning back to him. “We'll have both halves of the Ghost of Dunwall with us, and they have the Outsider on their side.”

“The Outsider wouldn't save a drowning rat,” Daud scoffed.

“The powers he seems to grant those he favors very well might.”

Sometimes, Daud's distaste for the demon in the Void sounded almost as virulent as that of the Overseers, though he had never told her why. He didn't now, either, turning away in a clear sign he would rather the conversation came to an end. Perhaps someday. His apparent ease with Corvo seemed a step in the right direction, at least.

She reached out to touch the handsome line of his jaw, and he flickered a low, grudging glance at her, and they met in their usual easy compromise: him accepting the present situation and her promising caution of some kind for next time. It was a well-practiced system.

Her door opened, and Corvo leaned in, beckoning. “Coast is clear.”

They came out after him, and across the hall Beatrici was holding a narrow door open, previously concealed behind a hanging tapestry. She waved them in.

“Keep close,” Corvo said, though his voice was muffled, and while Jessamine knew he was there she couldn't quite make out the space he occupied. He had said it would keep prying eyes away from them as well as himself. A hand closed lightly on her wrist, and she was tugged forward into the passageway, Daud following.

With the door closed, the cold stone corridor beyond it was dark, but once Beatrici lit a wall sconce something about it felt familiar.

“I remember these,” she said, looking around at the worn floor, at the flickering of the torch. “We— I used to play here as a child.” She glanced at Corvo, who had reappeared, still holding her wrist and Daud's—Delilah had still seemed a sensitive subject the last time she was mentioned—but he seemed to be focused on making headway, pulling them forward. Behind them, Beatrici shot her a look she couldn't read and followed, torch in hand.

Corvo's sister was still considered a new face in the Tower. She had gotten in partly with her report on Delilah and mostly on Corvo's word, which Daud trusted, and since Jessamine trusted Daud to exercise exacting judgement—he had never held back before—she had allowed it; but her work since then had been exemplary, too, and much of it under Daud's sharp-eyed supervision. The woman could pick out webs of interconnected information with surgical precision, and though she lacked a finer sense of the aristocratic push and pull of influence and hierarchy, she had been instrumental in the isolation of a contentious faction in Jessamine's own Parliament, one probably allied with Hiram. Jessamine had ordered those members put under discreet surveillance; now there were signs of a plan to free her traitorous once-Spymaster. It had only moved up the date of his death.

Beatrici was best when working with her brother, of course, but she was skilled at organizing the small group of spies she had been allowed to oversee as well, Daud had pointed out with a certain gleam in his eye. _We'll see,_ Jessamine had told him, and kept a closer eye on Beatrici since.

Skilled, yes, and as consummate a professional as her Royal Protector professed himself to be—but also hard to pin down. Corvo sometimes exuded playful energy around her, like a young hound with a playmate, and while Jessamine imagined that in private she might allow herself more, Beatrici hardly smiled if anyone else was in sight; always cold, always still, taking in her surroundings with dark, watchful eyes.

Like now, her steps near silent as she closed the rear, checking branching passageways while they went. If it was a role—that of the assassin, the distant heretic—she played it well.

Jessamine twisted her hand around to grab Corvo's wrist back, squeezing once.

“How did you find these passages?” she asked, keeping her voice low. “Even I had forgotten they were here.”

“The servants use them to stay out of sight.” He was still focused forward, making sure no one was coming towards them, and hadn't disappeared from sight since they had closed the door. Daud had told her once how exhausted it could make him, if he did it too long or spread himself too thin. “They're usually empty around now, though.”

Jessamine hummed, and allowed the silence to linger only a moment. “Skillfully avoided,” she said, not quite smirking, and Corvo ducked his head, though he didn't stop. “It doesn't answer my question, however.”

“I, uh, got curious and went exploring?”

Next to her, Daud was very clearly smirking and entirely unrepentant about it.

“How many tapestries did you look behind before finding something interesting?” she asked. Despite his embarrassment, Corvo still hadn't thought to let go of either of them; more to the point, Daud hadn't thought to protest, letting himself be pulled along without complaint. She wondered what he would do if she pointed it out, later on.

“I get thorough when I'm bored,” Corvo answered, and glanced pointedly at Daud. Jessamine's eyebrows went up; Daud's face went red. He maintained his composure, however, and only gave a warning growl low in his throat.

Corvo's intimate knowledge of the castle did bring up another question, however.

“Have you climbed up any chimneys?” she asked, innocuously curious, and knew she had been right when Corvo's shoulders hunched a fraction higher: he had found her room, the one hidden behind the hearth in the southern hall.

“In my defense,” he huffed, “I didn't know it was yours until the bonecharm told me.”

Jessamine had never quite been proud of her own poise, but she knew it had kept her from many a humiliating social incident throughout her life; in this case, it stopped her hand from tightening around Corvo's wrist and betraying the rapid, mortifying train of thought that followed her wondering what else the fertility bonecharm might have told him, if it had told him that.

“Well that's new,” Daud rumbled, blandly surprised.

“Not really,” Corvo said, and before Daud could ask him to elaborate in that threatening tone he had perfected over the years, he added, “It's how I knew what Arsenyev knew. He had a bonecharm that helped him hide.”

“Attano.” Her Protector's voice had gone flat. Jessamine wondered if she should intervene. “You lied?”

“I didn't think you'd believe me if I said a piece of whalebone told me all his secrets,” Corvo answered, edging on sardonic, and was saved from further interrogation by the door at the end of the corridor, which opened onto a small, cluttered space with its windows boarded shut. Here was their exit.

Corvo let go of her wrist, but Daud caught his before he could pull away, and kept him back as Jessamine and Beatrici went ahead. Before they stepped through onto an outer balcony, she heard Daud's voice, the softer one he used when he thought you needed it, saying, “It's fine. You were probably right,” and then she and Beatrici were outside.

The balcony overhung the port side of the Tower District; she could see all the way across the roofs from here, even to the clocktower. The rooms behind them might have been an apartment, once, though who might have lived there was unclear. A family of servants? Were there other spaces like this in the Tower, just on the other side of walls she had thought familiar?

Beatrici did not step closer, but leaned against the far side of the railing to look down and sweep her gaze across the rooftops below, as though taking measure of the drop.

“I'm not sure how safe it would be to take both you and the Protector at once,” she said as she straightened. “I'll bring him down first, so he can receive you.”

Jessamine made an acknowledging sound and looked out to the left, where the river met the cliffside; they were supposed to meet someone there, a man Corvo trusted. Daud had looked a little pinched when he said so, but Corvo had assured them that he hadn't told him who he was transporting, or where they wanted to go; he had payed him for a short trip somewhere close, and then back a few hours after that, and given nothing more. Daud, mollified, had grudgingly accepted, and glared at her when Jessamine put her fist to her mouth to hide her smile.

They had finished planning this two weeks ago—an escape from the Tower, from expectation, from all the eyes on her—and had only been waiting for an excuse. Anton's capitulation had been convenient. Now they would sneak away over the rooftops and river, to some quiet out-of-the-way place, like children out after dark, and for a moment she would be free, and Daud would mostly only be her close friend and confidant, and Corvo and Beatrici two people she was eager to come to know, and the memory of it all would carry her through what lay ahead a good long while. When they came back, if everything went well, the Royal Guard would be none the wiser. Jessamine would be the Empress again.

She wondered if her father had had these moments himself; moments where he saw the lack of forethought, the kind carelessness of others and wanted to be a boy again, not an Emperor. He had never seemed anything less than a ruler. She supposed the same was true for her: it was not a mantle she could entirely lay down, not even for an hour or two, but... she at least wanted to try.

Once Daud and Corvo joined them on the balcony, they started making their way down: Corvo, unafraid, stepped over the railing and made his way along the ledge running the length of the Tower until he reached a drainage pipe and was off; Beatrici took Daud's arm and vanished. For a handful of seconds, Jessamine was alone with the wind and the low smell of water.

Then Beatrici reappeared at her shoulder with a whisper of sound. “Your turn,” she said, and took her elbow.

It took three jumps to reach the shore, all of them disorienting; to her eyes it seemed as though the world folded at her feet, and while Beatrici simply stepped the gap, Jessamine felt a great rush of air and space hit her in the chest, like her body refused, at first, to accept the displacement. Finding packed sand under her soles was a relief, and she braced her hands on her hips, refusing to bend while she made herself breathe again.

At the edge of the river, partly hidden in the reeds, a boat lay waiting with an old sailor inside; Corvo, only just touching down from his spidering climb down ten meters of cliffside, ran over to greet him.

“Sam! Sam, good, you're here!” He waved them over. “Everyone, this is Samuel Beechworth.”

The sailor touched his forehead. He was graying and worn, rough-faced, but something in the way he regarded them, in how his resting mouth still looked a little like a smile, was soothing. It was no wonder Corvo had chosen him to ferry them. “Sam, you know Bea—that's Daud—and this is, uh...”

Corvo hesitated, glancing over to her. She nodded.

“This is Jess,” he finished. “We're going upriver, beyond Slaughterhouse Row. You know the beach, under the cliff? The neutral one?”

“Of course, Corvo,” Samuel said, then, after a moment's deliberation, stood and offered a hand to Jessamine. He had stilled at her name, and while he hadn't gone pale there had been a moment of panic while he inspected her face. He probably knew, then. “Ah... Welcome aboard?”

She offered him a smile, took his hand and stepped onto the boat.

The sun had come out and already burned the mist off the Wrenhaven, but as Samuel led his ship against the current the damp still fell on them as an invisible cloud, at its worst in the middle of the river. Daud waited until they were underway to break the silence.

“Neutral zone?” he asked, turning to Corvo.

Corvo shrugged. “The smuggling gangs aren't supposed to hide anything there. It's safe. When the river rises it floods the caverns, anyway.”

“Sounds like a good spot for a cache, though. Not sure the Watch even know about it.” Daud eyed him, his gaze pointed. “How did you know it was there?”

Corvo looked off upriver, lips pursed and chin jammed in his hand, as though looking standoffish would convince Daud to let up. “No reason,” he huffed.

Going by how dark his cheeks were getting, and the fond quirk of Samuel's mouth, Jessamine had a theory; Beatrici's mocking snort confirmed it. She wondered whether Samuel had brought Corvo and his ex-paramour to the beach then, too; when Corvo glanced back, saw Samuel's expression and turned redder before looking away, she wondered whether the old sailor had _been_ the paramour. He didn't seem inclined.

Daud looked to have agreed with her, in any case, because he let Corvo stew and turned to Samuel instead.

“How long until we get there?” he asked.

“She's calm today,” Samuel answered, quiet. The water threw ripples of light onto the side of his face. “It shouldn't be more then twenty minutes.”

Jessamine made a considering noise. “Is the river a woman to all sailors?”

“I don't think so.” He smiled again, though it seemed to be for himself. “She only reminds me of someone, some days.”

There had been a name painted on the boat's hull: _Amaranth._ She wondered if that was who the sailor remembered, but didn't pry.

As they neared the slaughterhouses, the smell of whale's blood started to rise, and when Jessamine leaned over to look long, narrow shapes darted past the keel. Hagfish, she thought, and moved a little further from the edge.

The Empress did not often have need to sail up the Wrenhaven—so while she knew that there were fewer whales coming in, knew that there had been many slaughterhouses going bankrupt lately, all of it vague statistics hanging around the edges of end-of-year discussions and budget planning, this was the first time she truly saw, with her own eyes, a significant part of the picture.

Many of the warehouses lining the shore seemed empty, or gutted, ironically enough. Nothing moved, and what ships were docked near them were listing in the water. Still, somehow, impossibly—where there still seemed to be activity—the river ran black, and the smell grew choking enough that they all hid their noses in their coats, except for Samuel. He guided them on, unbothered. Perhaps he had grown used to it.

Even Beatrici took a deep, cleansing draft of river air once they were past.

“Almost there,” Samuel said once the cliffside started to climb up again, the city crawling up the curve of its back. “Corvo knows, but I do think you should have a look in the caverns if you get the time—the river carves interesting patterns in the rock. Don't go too far in, though, it gets very dark.”

He left them on the sandy shore and cast off again, citing business, promising to be back in a couple of hours. The river lapped at their shoes as they disembarked; this far up the Wrenhaven, the water was strangely clear, different from the turbulent, muddy soup Jessamine was used to seeing—and in a burst of curiosity she took off her gloves, stuffed them in her jacket pocket and ran her hands through the water, disturbing silt and small pebbles. It was cool, almost silky. She could hear the rush of the river's great body running by, but here, where it had carved a small pocket in the rock, there were only tiny wavelets.

Daud still had the basket; Jessamine went and flipped open the lid, drawing out the blanket and laying it out on dry sand. If they were going to have a picnic, they were going to do it _right._

Jessamine took a seat on one corner and started to bring out the food, Corvo crouching nearby, trying to look inside.

“What did you pack?” he asked. Jessamine couldn't help but think of Daud sneaking a glimpse, back at the Tower. In certain ways, they were very evenly matched.

“You'll find out in a moment,” she answered, because the kitchen staff had packed the food and she had no idea what there was. Sandwiches? Cut fruit? That was usually what they served when she took lunch out in the Tower gardens.

She was right about the sandwiches and cut fruit, but there were many other things besides: boiled eggs, cold cuts of beef, a small jar of preserved cherries and two of pickles. Daud sat by her and took off his boots, his socks, to wriggle his bare feet into the sand; Corvo flopped down right against his side, refusing to budge for glare or stab of elbow in the ribs. Daud grunted, grabbed the equivalent of half a sliced apple from the fresh fruit, and resigned himself to his fate.

Quiet as always, Beatrici took the last available corner. Her brother had sprawled across most of the rest of the blanket.

Jessamine picked out a hard-boiled egg—they had been shelled already, wrapped in damp napkins like something precious—and bit through to the still-soft golden yolk, waiting—as Daud reached back for a sandwich, careful not to jostle Corvo draped partly over his shoulder—for the opportune moment.

Once he had a mouthful of bread, cheese and ham, she looked down at his feet buried in sand and asked, “Is it Karnaca you're thinking of?”

He turned to her, looking ridiculous with the sandwich in his mouth; realized this, bit down, and found himself no better off with his mouth full. He squinted at her in reproach.

She smiled and bit off more of her egg.

“It's not hot enough to be like Karnaca,” Corvo answered in his stead, having thieved half of the contents out of Daud's sandwich while he wasn't paying attention. Daud turned to him now, scowling and chewing furiously. Jessamine thought it was warm enough for a Dunwall kind of day, only a few clouds hazing across the sun, the light streaming into their little cove at just the right angle when they passed—but she could remember having visited Serkonos, once, one of the more northern ports, and could admit that it had been dizzyingly hot at the time.

“You'd steal right out of the hands of babies,” Daud growled once he'd swallowed, shaking him off, and Corvo fell limply away to the blanket.

“I didn't know you were so young,” Corvo said, sweet and grinning. “You look at least a decade older than me.”

Daud snarled and threw himself on him, and when Corvo grabbed for his shoulders and rolled them over Beatrici threw her arms over her face and yelled, “Not on the food!” and they pushed off the blanket into the sand, grappling like children, kicking grit everywhere. In concert, Jessamine and Beatrici threw cloth napkins over what had been unpacked and slapped the basket lid closed.

“You'd think he never starved,” Beatrici muttered. Jessamine glanced over at her and she stiffened, wrapping the napins more tightly around everything, like she had said something she hadn't meant to.

“I imagine he hasn't in some time,” Jessamine said, offering her a half-smile when she glanced over again, enough to comfort and not seem too gracious. Full smiles hadn't worked well in the past. “Can't it be good that he's forgetting?”

Beatrici slowed in her work, considering the question. “I guess it could.” She was still looking at them wrestling, but her eyes were unfocused, turned to thought rather than sight.

Daud had gotten Corvo on his stomach and was pushing his face into the sand with the grip on his hair, gritting out, “How do you like that sandwich now, huh?” Corvo flailed a moment longer, then hit the sand with his palm like Jessamine had seen guards do in practice to tap out; but as soon as Daud took his knee from Corvo's back he was a whirlwind, whipping out and catching Daud by the waist, slamming him down to the sand again, and Jessamine couldn't help but laugh as a new bout started.

It felt good, so good to laugh: sometimes she felt that her breath refused to go all the way into her lungs, and however much she tried to follow the breathing and stretching exercises Daud had taught her in the safety of her room the feeling refused to abate—but when she laughed it was a full thing, reaching down and pulling the sound up from her stomach.

It felt good to see this side of Daud, too. She saw it sometimes in how he was with the Watch guard he called Rulf in private, or some of the others, those she knew he had in a sense grown up with though she had never learned under what circumstances. Some things he refused to share, even if she desperately wanted to know. Could she be faulted, then, for finding a personal joy in seeing him playful, when for the years since he became her Royal Protector he had so often been dour and wry?

She unwrapped her own sandwich as the boys continued to flip each other into the sand, Daud brutal and relentless, Corvo a ducking, nimble flash—then, halfway through, realized Beatrici had gone, the other corner of the blanket empty. A quick glance around the beach gave her nothing, but then there were few places one could go here barring swimming into the river. She must have gone to the caves.

She knew Beatrici usually kept to herself, separate from those who lived in or near the Tower by nature, but this outing had been for them all and it seemed a pity to let habit get in the way of that. Jessamine hadn't even seen her eat a thing.

Decided, she picked up an egg and a whole peach, and made her way up the unsteady sand to where the ground became rock and the cliff caved in like a toothy mouth.

Beatrici was still there, just beyond the entrance, but she looked back when Jessamine stepped onto stone. Her eyes dropped to the egg and the fruit, and Jessamine came closer and held them out.

“Won't you eat?” she asked. Beatrici's eyes narrowed.

“I'm not some feral thing that needs to be tamed,” she said, dry, but delicately took the peach from Jessamine's hand and bit into it, slurping juice, then grabbed the egg too and turned back to step deeper into the cavern.

Though the mouth of the cave didn't reach very high, inside the ceiling sloped upwards, jagged with gleaming stalagtites, until the meager light coming in from outside failed and it was lost in shadow. They stepped gingerly over uneven ground, going deeper still, until it was hard to see what lay beyond the next footfall. Somewhere from the back of the cavern there came a distant, regular echo. It dripped like a watery clock.

Beatrici had stopped by one of the walls, hand pressed up against it; in the dim light the damp stone seemed on the verge of moving.

“What do you think of the Tower?” Jessamine asked, partly to distract herself, touching the wall as well. It felt slick under her hand. She stepped away before she could imagine it pulsing.

Beatrici startled as though she'd been pulled from deep thought; Jessamine thought she could see her frown, though at the wall more than at her. She made a little noise, curiosity or wariness or disinterest, and shrugged. “The resident dragon's a little territorial for my tastes.”

Jessamine laughed, surprised herself when it burst up and bounced in cascades down the cavern's gullet. She hadn't expected the image, though it was appropriate: Daud had never enjoyed being forced to cooperate with the rest of her security detail, and would have suspiciously stalked the Tower like a beast in its lair if he'd been allowed.

“He grows on you,” she said, still grinning, finding the expression strange but freeing, “Much like your brother.” They started back to the mouth of the cave. Jessamine threw her a testing glance. “And much like, I imagine, yourself.”

Beatrici snorted; in the growing light, Jessamine was sure she could see the edge of a smile. “My brother doesn't grow on people,” she said, biting off the last of the peach. “He just steps in, and he's home.” The words seemed wry, but her tone was deeply fond. She sucked peach juice off her fingers and threw the pit into the clattering dark.

“If Daud is the dragon...” Jessamine said, considering, “Am I the princess?”

Beatrici looked at her. It was sustained, and searching; the mouth of the cave, an impression in light, seemed to reflect in her eyes. “Not sure you'd ever accept anything but Empress,” she said, finally, and it tugged on something in Jessamine's chest—either the words, or how she turned away then, looking ahead, lost in thought again. “You're a little like... like your half-sister, like that,” she added, and Jessamine wondered whether the absence of Delilah's name was to protect her, or herself. Beatrici's mouth twisted, rueful, the expression clear now that they were near the entrance. “But I guess she lost the kindness along the way.”

It was possibly the most Jessamine had heard her say at once, outside of a report. Around them, stalagmites grew up from the floor like strange teeth.

“Kindness is not all that makes an Empress,” Jessamine said, and what she meant was a little bit of _I wonder whether she would have made a worthy replacement,_ and a little bit of _I wonder if you know the things I've been called upon to do,_ but in all fairness Beatrici probably did know. You didn't practice a trade like hers without seeing the darker side of Dunwall's aristocracy.

“No,” Bea said, “but it's important to you.” Her eyes cut to the side, to Jessamine. “And you have people like me for the rest.” She started in on the egg.

It threw her, though her own position forbade her from admitting, because it had sounded for all the world like Beatrici had just casually sworn allegiance to her.

Perhaps she was overreaching—perhaps she was reading too far into the words of a person unused to the constant conversational battles of the court—but there had been a weight to the words, to the look she had given, that Jessamine couldn't ignore. Beatrici stood there, still as elusive, as wary, unchanged—yet on her side. Undeniably. Had it happened just now? Over the last month? She usually had better insight, but Beatrici seemed a particular case.

She finished her egg, carving off the white with her teeth and chewing on the yolk whole.

Further down the beach, Daud thrashed up from having a handful of sand dumped down the back of his shirt and looked around to find Jessamine gone.

He turned on his heel; checked either side of the shore; looked up, along the cliff's edge, and ran out of visible space she could feasibly have gone to. Corvo sidled in with a look on his face like mischief in action and Daud pushed him off, brusque, hard enough he tumbled backwards.

“Did you see where the Empress went?” he asked, still scanning, like she might pop into existence. Everything else was still there.

“She's fine if Bea's with her,” Corvo said from the ground. “Which Bea definitely is,” he added, when Daud turned on him with a narrow-eyed glare. The irritation did not abate. “It means we have the whole picnic basket to ourselves?” he offered, and Daud growled, looking up to the cliffside.

“I'll check the caves,” he said, and headed off.

“Daud!” Corvo called after him; there came the sound of scrambling in the sand, then quick footsteps. “Daud.” Now he was hovering at his side like a persistent shadow. “ _Daud._ ”

“What,” he gritted out, and Corvo jumped on his back, arms circling his neck, legs wrapping around his hips. Daud tried to keep moving forward but the sand slid under him, and he folded with an exasperated squawk.

“Daud,” Corvo said again, right by his ear.

“You are getting on my last nerve,” Daud snarled into the sand. He knew she was probably fine; no one had come in from the water, no one had crawled down the cliff to the beach, Beatrici was with her and she was _fine._ He just didn't like the thought of her out here, and undefended.

“So I had a question.” Corvo settled in on top of him, and Daud was sorely tempted to shove him off and make him eat sand again, which probably meant this distraction was working. His nose tucked into Daud's neck, cold. “Do you just love her because you've known her so long, or do you also want to invite her to your bed?”

“Don't be crass,” he shot back on automatic, “That would be rank unprofessionalism.”

Corvo tried to kiss the nape of his neck and spat out sand; Daud laughed at him, and finally shoved him off, dusting more sand from his clothes as he stood. It was a wasted effort: they were both covered in the stuff after tussling in it for the better part of a quarter-hour.

“But we have a _lot_ of sex,” Corvo retorted, “And technically you're my boss.”

“We were fucking before you got hired, it's just continuity,” Daud said dismissively, helping him up, then looked him in the eyes with a quiet consideration. “Why do you think I'd want to—?”

Corvo's eyes had dropped to his mouth. His tongue poked out, but he seemed to remember what had happened last time and ran his wrist over his face only to add more sand to everything; he gave up with a heavy sigh.

“The way you look at her sometimes,” he said. “How worried you get.”

“I'm her bodyguard, worrying is part of the job.”

Corvo shot him the fond, quirking smile that crinkled the edges of his eyes. “Not the way you do it. When you worry, it's personal.”

“Mm.” Daud's mouth pursed, but it wasn't so much offended as thoughtful, calculating options and outcomes. It took him a moment; then, he flicked a glance over, searching. “I think if she asked, I might say yes. Does that... bother you?”

“I love a lot of people,” Corvo answered, earnest, then leaned and grabbed Daud's ass with a wicked little smirk, “In many, _many_ ways. I haven't met many who do the same.” He grinned. “And her face is almost as pretty as mine, so who can blame you? I might even ask if you share.”

Daud grunted and cuffed him upside the head, but he was smiling a little, grudging and irritated but there. “Maybe I'll drop you like a dead hagfish instead. She's a much better catch.”

“Everyone in Dunwall thinks dead hagfish are a treat,” Corvo shot back, throwing an arm around Daud's shoulders and starting up the beach again. “Anyway, I'd just seduce my way into her bed, and then we could fight over whose ass she gets first.”

“She's harder to sway than you think.”

“Then why does your sour face work on her all the time?” Corvo asked, impish, and answered Daud's glare with a darting peck of a kiss. “Come on, let's go find your Empress.”

She wasn't far, and Beatrici _was_ with her; they were looking at the walls of the cave in silence, like they could see something there, something more than rock carved into eddies by centuries of water. Corvo leaned in to his shoulder, and when Daud turned he was staring, a surprised glint in his eye, at the narrow space between Jessamine and his sister.

“We might have competition,” he said, low, and wheezed through the laughter when Daud knocked him in the ribs.

Samuel came back an hour or so later, the sound of the motor's rumbling reaching them even before he rounded the edge of the cliff. Lunch was finished, and everything packed but the blanket, which Corvo had almost entirely claimed to lounge in the weak sun.

Daud stood at the sight of the boat, and held out a hand for Jess; and when Jess was standing she reached down for Beatrici, who stared at her outstretched hand.

“I have lost much to the last year,” Jessamine said, “As many others did, including a sister—but I hope to have found another friend?”

It had to be a question, if she wanted it to be an overture; she didn't think Beatrici would accept anything less. She looked to Jessamine, then back to her hand, and finally took it and pulled herself up with Jessamine's help.

“An ally, at least,” she said, and rolled Corvo off the blanket with one foot to pack it up and carry the basket down the beach, her brother on her heels. Jess watched her walk down to the water, then turned to her Protector.

“Daud,” she said. There was little else she needed to say.

Daud gave her a knowing look from the corner of his eye. “You already know what I think.”

“Then it's decided.” Jess started towards the boat. The sun was still high, light and gentle heat streaming into their faces, glancing off the river in a thousand silver lines. “This time next month, we will have a new spymaster.”

“I'll have her briefed,” Daud said, dry, and followed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALSO I FORGOT BECAUSE I'M DUMB: CREDIT GOES TO THEGRUMBLINGIRL FOR "A MAN'S GOTTA EAT" THANK YOU I LOVE YOU BYE NOW


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